IN    RED    MAN'S   LAND 


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PRESENT  DAY  WARRIORS. 


Issued  under  the  direction  of  the  Council  of 
Women  for  Home  Missions 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

A  Study  of  The  American  Indian 


BY 
FRANCIS   E.    LEUPP 

Former  United  States  Commissioner  of  Indian  Affairs 

Author  of 
'«  The  Indian  and  His  Problem  " 


Illustrated 


NEW  YORK  CHICAGO  TORONTO 

Fleming    H.    Revell    Company 

LONDON  AND  EDINBURGH 


Copyright,  1914,  by 
FLEMING  H.   REVELL  COMPANY 


IS8« -Fifth.  A^enlte 

**  J2C5-N".  "ivfehijiV^uro: 

Toronto  :  25  Richmond  St.,  W. 
London  :  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh  :  100  Princes  Street 


TO 

A.  M.  L., 

the  partner  of  a  lifetime,  who, 

season  after  season,  kept  the  campfire  burning  while 

the  Little  White  Father  was  roaming  through 

Red  Man's  Land 


AUTHOR'S  PREFACE 

IN  the  pages  which  follow  I  have  tried  to  avoid 
going  over  any  of  the  ground  covered  by  "  The 
Indian  and  His  Problem."  The  purpose  of  that 
work  was  to  set  forth  the  larger  relations  of  the 
aboriginal  race  to  our  governmental  mechanism,  and 
to  indicate  the  lines  of  legislation  and  administration 
necessary  to  their  proper  adjustment.  In  "  In  Red 
Man's  Land  "  my  aim  has  been  to  deal  with  the  In 
dian  as  an  individual,  as  if  I  were  introducing  an  old 
resident  to  new  neighbors.  As  the  two  books  present 
respectively  the  civic  and  the  human  aspects  of  the 
Indian,  they  are  designed  to  supplement  each  other 
wherever  they  appeal  to  the  same  readers.  The  gen 
erous  reception  accorded  my  earlier  volume  encour 
ages  me  to  hope  for  equal  consideration  for  its 
successor. 

F.  E.  L. 
WASHINGTON,  D.  C., 


CONTENTS 

I.  THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN     ....  15 

II.  THE  RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       .  39 

III.  THE  RED  MAN  AND  His  WHITE  NEIGHBOR  .  63 

IV.  THE  RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER       .  87 
V.  ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN  .       .  105 

VI.     THE  RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  .   127 

VII.     SUPPLEMENTAL  :     "  MISSIONS  TO  THE   RED 

MAN/'  BY  REV.  A.  F.  BEARD,  D.D.  .       .  148 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  .  161 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

PRESENT  DAY  WARRIORS Frontispiece 

MEDICINE  CHIEFS  PREPARING  FOR  THE  DANCE  . . . . 30 

NAVAJO  HOME  (A  RUG  IN  PROCESS)    44 

MOQUI  GIRLS    (WITH  HEADDRESS   INDICATING  MARRIAGEABLE 
AGE) 56 

INDIAN  HOMES   (BEST  OF  THE  NEW  TYPE) 64 

OJIBWAY  TEPEES  (TYPICAL  OF  THE  PASSING  OLD  LIFE)  64 

OLD   APACHE   WOMAN 80 

NAVAJO  CAMP  SCENE 100 

ALASKAN  TOTEM  POLE  .  ......  .116 


I 

THE  ABORIGINAL  RED   MAN 


Long  ago  the  Great  Mystery  caused  this  land  to  be,  and  made 
the  Indians  to  live  in  this  land.  Well  has  the  Indian  fulfilled 
all  the  intent  of  the  Great  Mystery  for  him. 

The  white  man  has  never  known  the  Indian.  It  is  thus : 
there  are  two  roads,  the  white  man's  road  and  the  Indian's  road. 
Neither  traveler  knows  the  road  of  the  other.  Thus  ever  has 
it  been,  from  the  long-ago  even  unto  to-day. 

I  want  all  Indians  and  white  men  to  read  and  learn  how  the 
Indians  lived  and  thought  in  the  olden  time,  and  may  it  bring 
holy-good  upon  the  younger  Indians  to  know  of  their  fathers. 
A  little  while  and  the  old  Indians  will  no  longer  be,  and  the 
young  will  be  even  as  white  men. — CHIEF  HIAMOVI,  in  "  The 
Indian's  Book." 

As  monumental  bronze  unchanged  his  look: 
A  soul  that  pity  touched,  but  never  shook: 
Trained,  from  his  tree-rocked  cradle  to  his  bier, 
The  fierce  extremes  of  good  and  ill  to  brook 
Impassive — fearing  but  the  shame  of  fear — 
A  stoic  of  the  woods — a  man  without  a  tear. 

— CAMPBELL. 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN 

PERSONS  who  know  how  much  I  have  been  in 
Red  Man's  Land  sometimes  remark,  in  entire 
sincerity :  "  Of  course,  you  understand  the  In- 
"dian  language  ?  "  They  are  astonished  when  told  that 
there  is  no  "  Indian  language  " ;  that  between  fifty 
and  sixty  distinct  tongues  exist  among  the  Indians 
in  the  United  States,  and  that  every  one  of  these  has 
sundry  dialects,  so  that  it  would  be  safe  to  say  that 
two  or  three  hundred  languages  are  spoken  by  as 
many  groups  of  our  Indian  neighbors.  As  the  In 
dians  now  living  number  roughly  three  hundred  thou 
sand,  this  would  average  one  language  to,  say,  every 
twelve  hundred.  Actually,  there  is  nothing  like  so 
even  a  division.  There  are  several  remnants  of  tribes 
to-day  which  contain  less  than  one  hundred  souls. 
Indeed,  a  few  years  ago  an  Indian  was  discovered 
who  was  absolutely,  as  far  as  could  be  ascertained, 
the  sole  survivor  of  his  people. 

Out  of  the  primitive  Babel  was  developed,  in  one 
part  of  our  country,  a  language  of  signs.  In  the  old 
days,  when  the  bison  ranged  over  the  mid-continental 
plains,  hunting  parties  of  Indians  from  different  tribes 
would  occasionally  meet  in  a  common  chase.  Neither 
in  asking  nor  in  giving  information  orally  could  one 

15 


16  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

party  understand  the  other;  so  resort  was  had  to 
various  motions  of  the  head,  hands,  fingers,  arms  and 
body  which  would  convey  an  idea  by  suggestion,  like 
spreading  downward  the  first  and  second  fingers  of 
one  hand,  bestriding  with  them  the  outstretched  fore 
finger  of  the  other,  and  moving  the  combination  for 
ward  with  short  vertical  curves  to  indicate  a  man  rid 
ing  a  horse.  Many  years  of  use  elaborated  the  system 
from  a  few  signs  with  obvious  meanings  to  a  multi 
tude  whose  relation  to  the  main  source  was  more  or 
less  remote.  Even  to-day,  among  the  older  members 
of  the  plains  tribes,  are  several  thorough  masters  of 
the  art  of  sign-communication,  and  I  have  seen  some 
of  them  converse  for  hours  without  uttering  an  audi 
ble  word. 

I  mention  the  diversity  of  languages  among  the 
Indians  because  it  typifies  their  diversities  generally, 
and  illustrates  the  difficulty  of  writing  about  the  char 
acteristics  of  a  race  broken  into  groups  which  differ  as 
widely  as  corresponding  groups  of  our  own  race.  In 
whatever  follows,  therefore,  the  reader  must  bear  in 
mind  that  I  am  not  attempting  to  depict  the  life  and 
traits  of  all  the  Indians  on  the  one  hand,  or  of  any 
particular  tribe  on  the  other.  Rather,  I  am  trying 
to  give  him  a  composite  impression,  in  very  limited 
space,  of  a  subject  broad  in  scope  and  embarrassing 
in  detail.  For  the  purpose  of  this  chapter,  moreover, 
I  must  confine  my  attention  to  the  Indian  as  he  was 
before  he  had  passed  under  Caucasian  influence.  Of 
the  more  modern  type  I  shall  speak  later. 

At  the  very  outset  of  his  life,  the  Indian  of  yore 
was  sure  of  warm  welcome.  His  people  had  not 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  17 

learned  to  regard  a  family  as  a  burden.  The  simple 
habits  of  the  Indian  woman  raised  no  obstacles  to 
her  giving  birth  to  a  babe  to-day  and  resuming  her 
round  of  life  to-morrow  at  the  latest.  She  had  never 
bound  her  body  in  stiff  sheaths.  She  could  stir  about 
her  daily  work,  or  tramp  for  many  miles  when  moving 
camp,  without  exhaustion,  because  she  used  the  whole 
sole  of  her  foot  in  walking,  and  her  gait  was  steadied 
by  long  practice  in  carrying  an  open  water-vessel  on 
her  head.  She  spent  most  of  her  time  in  the  fresh 
air  and  sunlight.  The  muscles  of  her  chest  and  arms, 
hips  and  back,  were  strengthened  by  burden-bearing, 
and  kept  mobile  by  wielding  the  rude  implements  with 
which  she  dressed  big  game  or  cultivated  her  patch 
of  corn  and  beans.  In  spite  of  the  harm  occasionally 
wrought  by  overdoing,  there  is  no  doubt  that  the 
regimen  of  nomadic  camp  life  better  fitted  a  woman 
for  bearing  and  rearing  a  family  than  the  artificiali 
ties  of  our  highly  organized  society. 

The  father  welcomed  the  baby  as  heartily  as  the 
mother.  He  loved  children  for  their  own  sake.  Their 
pranks  and  prattle  entertained  him,  and  he  was  un 
disturbed  by  forebodings  for  their  future.  He  had 
not  spent  a  lifetime  at  hard  delving,  and  grasping 
at  hazards  that  turned  his  hair  prematurely  gray,  in 
order  to  amass  a  fortune  on  whose  income  his  prog 
eny  could  live  in  idleness.  Sufficient  unto  the  day, 
was  the  rule  for  him.  If,  before  the  snows  came,  he 
had  stored  up  enough  dry  food  to  tide  him  over  those 
periods  when  the  drifts  forbade  hunting,  he  settled 
down  into  his  winter  quarters  with  a  contented  heart. 
With  the  dawn  of  spring  he  was  off  at  once  for  the 


18  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

woods  and  streams,  or  to  wage  a  war  of  plunder  upon 
some  enemy.  If  his  stores  had  given  out  meanwhile, 
there  might  be  neighbors  more  fortunate;  and  food 
was  one  of  the  necessaries  every  one  was  presumed  to 
be  willing  to  share  with  a  friend  in  distress. 

This  was  the  little  world  into  which  the  babe  was 
ushered — one  that  was  ready  for  it  in  a  simple,  un 
studied  way,  and  that  counted  it  an  asset  rather  than 
an  added  liability.  It  is  true  that  a  son's  greeting 
may  have  been  a  trifle  more  demonstrative  than  a 
daughter's,  but  even  a  daughter  was  not  unwelcome. 
Though  she  could  be  of  no  direct  value  in  war  or 
the  chase,  she  could  be  trained  to  cook  and  care  for 
the  camp;  and  the  chances  were  that,  when  she  at 
tained  a  marriageable  age,  she  would  be  sought  as 
a  wife  by  some  man  who,  in  the  ardor  of  his  court 
ship,  would  be  willing  to  present  her  parents  with 
dried  foods,  hides  or  blankets,  pipes  or  tobacco,  in 
quantities  sufficient  to  compensate  them  for  the  loss 
of  her  companionship. 

No  skilled  surgeons  or  white-capped  nurses  were 
at  the  mother's  bedside  when  the  little  one  came. 
Some  older  woman  of  the  camp  was  there,  perhaps, 
to  lend  a  hand  in  case  of  need,  and  the  father  to 
note  the  omens.  Over  the  hill  yonder  a  vagrant 
coyote  might  be  peering  toward  the  tepee  in  which 
the  new  life  was  beginning.  Possibly  it  was  very 
early  in  the  morning,  and  the  coyote  bayed  at  the 
moon  which  had  not  yet  faded  from  the  heavens. 
Here  was  an  omen  which  the  father  was  quick  to 
seize  upon:  the  child,  born  just  as  the  coyote's  open 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  19 

mouth  was  lifted  upward,  should  bear  for  its  infant 
name,  "  Laughs-at-the-Sky." 

It  is  a  fashion  among  whites  to  make  fun  of  the 
eccentricities  of  Indian  nomenclature;  but  perhaps,  if 
we  look  underneath  the  surface,  we  find  as  much  that 
is  reasonable  in  it  as  in  the  corresponding  practice 
among  our  own  ancestors,  who  named  a  boy  Theo 
dore  because  it  meant  a  "  gift  from  God,"  or  adopted 
the  surname  Smith  because  the  head  of  the  family 
was  a  worker  in  metals.  A  name,  after  all,  is  of 
value  only  for  identification;  and  the  Indians  fol 
lowed  good  Jewish  precedent  in  re-naming  a  person 
at  various  stages  of  his  career  when  he  had  done  or 
suffered  something  worthy  of  such  commemoration. 

While  Laughs-at-the-Sky  remained  a  little  child  he 
wore  no  clothing,  except  in  the  coldest  winter  weather, 
when  his  mother  would  wrap  him  in  a  hide  which  she 
had  tanned  herself  and  made  so  soft  that  it  folded 
about  his  body  almost  like  cloth.  Until  he  could 
walk,  he  spent  much  of  his  time  on  a  baby-board,  K 
the  Indian  equivalent  of  a  cradle.  This  was  a  short, 
thin,  flat  slab,  with  wrappings  lashed  to  its  lowrer 
end  so  that  a  baby  laid  upon  it  could  be  swathed  and 
tied  fast  as  neatly  as  a  Caucasian  infant  is  tucked  into 
its  more  pretentious  bed.  The  advantage  of  the  board 
over  a  cradle  was  that  it  could  be  lifted  and  slung 
against  the  mother's  back,  and  thus  she  could  carry 
her  baby  about  with  her  as  she  moved  from  place  to 
place.  When  she  was  tired  of  carrying  it,  she  could 
set  it  upright  against  the  nearest  tree  or  shrub,  whence 
the  baby  could  watch  what  was  going  on  far  better 
than  if  it  were  on  its  back,  seeing  everything  at  a 


20  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

distorted  angle.  More  important  yet,  the  baby-board, 
by  virtue  of  being  shaped  somewhat  like  the  human 
form,  kept  the  trunk  and  extremities  of  its  little  ten- 
|  ant  continually  in  a  normal  position;  and  this  undoubt 
edly  went  far  toward  giving  the  adult  Indian,  in  his 
primitive  state,  his  arrow-like  straightness. 

Grown  old  enough  to  run  about  and  play,  Laughs- 
at-the-Sky  amused  himself  with  a  toy  bow  and  arrow 
made  for  him  by  his  father,  taking  aim,  as  he  walked 
across  the  prairie  or  through  the  woods,  at  every 
bird  or  rabbit  he  scared  up.  When  his  father  went 
to  bathe  in  the  neighboring  creek,  the  little  fellow 
trotted  along,  and  was  first  duly  immersed,  and  then 
left  to  splash  in  the  shallow  water  at  will.  At  an 
early  age  he  picked  up  the  art  of  swimming,  as  the 
small  wildings  learn  it,  partly  by  intuition  and  partly 
by  imitation.  In  this  matter,  as  in  many  another 
which  contributed  to  his  training  for  life,  there  was 
no  compulsion  from  his  elders.  He  was  not  violently 
scolded,  or  threatened  with  a  whipping,  or  sent  to 
bed  without  his  supper  for  naughtiness.  There  was 
no  effort  to  break  his  will,  or  discipline  him  to  the 
point  where  obedience  degenerates  into  subservience. 
His  father  and  mother  left  him  very  much  to  him 
self,  even  their  occasional  admonitions  being  delivered 
with  no  evidence  of  strong  feeling.  The  whole  at 
mosphere  of  the  camp  was  temperate,  unemotional, 
free  from  needless  noise.  A  word  of  counsel  from 
the  old  men  answered  most  of  the  purposes  for  which, 
in  our  modern  communities,  we  maintain  courts. 

Of  course,  Laughs-at-the-Sky  did  not  go  to  school, 
for  such  an  institution  was  unknown  among  his  peo- 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  21 

pie.  Of  what  we  call  learning  there  was  none.  In 
the  absence  of  an  alphabet  and  an  articulated  writ 
ten  language,  there  were  only  pictures  and  symbolic 
designs,  with  either  an  historical  record  or  a  spiritual 
reminder  in  view.  So  far  from  having  to  learn  to 
read  and  write  and  cipher  in  order  to  hold  their  own 
against  their  neighbors  in  trade,  the  red  folk  were 
accustomed  to  go  directly  to  the  prime  sources  of 
supply  for  food  and  raiment  and  shelter.  The  boy, 
therefore,  was  taught  to  hunt  and  fish  and  set  traps 
for  game;  the  girl  was  taught  to  cook  and  keep  the 
camp  comfortable.  Here  we  find  vocational  instruc 
tion  and  domestic  science  reduced  to  their  very  low 
est  terms. 

Nor  was  the  religious  training  of  children  neglected. 
The  red  man's  religion,  however,  was  in  every  sense 
a  religion  of  nature.  In  detail,  there  were  differences  I 
between  the  faiths  of  different  tribes,  but  natural 
phenomena  furnished  the  foundations  of  all  of  them. 
Magnitude,  grandeur,  power,  were  the  attributes  which 
most  strongly  moved  the  imagination  of  the  aborigine 
and  stirred  in  him  the  impulse  of  worship.  To  a  great 
wind,  a  flood,  a  huge  boulder,  a  livid  cloud,  he  would 
pray  in  order  that  its  terrors  might  be  averted  from 
his  camp.  The  sun  was,  to  the  majority  of  the  In 
dians,  the  embodiment  of  Deity,  because  it  played  so 
large  a  part  in  everything  on  which  they  depended 
for  support  and  enjoyment. 

Back  of  all  these  images,  it  is  true,  there  lurked 
in  the  minds  of  the  more  advanced  tribes  a  vague 
notion  of  an  invisible,  intangible,  inscrutable  essence 
— the  Great  Spirit,  or  the  Great  White  Spirit,  as  we 


22  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

find  it  described  in  literature.  But  the  broader  ethical 
phases  of  what  we  understand  by  religion  appear  to 
have  been  attached  very  loosely  to,  rather  than  inter 
woven  with,  these  ancient  faiths.  One's  duty  to  one's 
fellows  was  obviously  a  subject  to  be  considered  by 
'itself,  and  the  Indian's  ethical  philosophy  grew  largely 
out  of  his  social  environment.  A  peaceable  disposi 
tion,  soft  words,  a  gentle  voice  and  manner,  liberality 
— all  these  were,  in  such  a  society  as  that  in  which  he 
lived,  necessary  to  the  common  comfort;  so  the  wise 
Indian  endured  an  occasional  injustice  with  unruffled 
front,  rather  than  risk  all  that  the  opposite  course 
might  bring  upon  him.  By  this  I  do  not  mean  that 
Laughs-at-the-Sky  grew  up  in  ignorance  of  what  a 
quarrel  meant.  Among  the  red  men  of  old,  as  among 
other  races  then  and  since,  there  were  many  individ 
uals  who  disregarded  the  ideals  they  had  always  been 
taught  to  revere.  But  the  tone  and  temper  given  to 
an  Indian  camp  generally  by  those  ideals  made  it 
as  harmonious  and  restful  a  dwelling-place  as  the 
world  probably  has  ever  seen. 

In  another  and  very  practical  direction,  young 
Laughs-at-the-Sky  received  a  good  training.  He  had 
to  know  how  to  take  care  of  himself  in  the  daily 
struggle  with  the  forces  of  nature  and  the  occasional 
contest  with  human  enemies  which  would  fall  to  his 
lot  in  manhood;  and  this  involved  his  early  learning 
not  only  how  to  follow  trails  and  shoot,  propel  a 
boat  and  fish,  but  also  how  to  practice  various  simple 
handicrafts.  He  must  be  able  to  select  the  right 
pliant  wood  for  his  bow  and  the  right  rigid  wood  for 
his  arrows,  and  to  fashion  these  with  implements 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  23 

made  of  sharpened  stone  and  bones.  In  giving  the 
bow  just  the  best  temper,  he  might  have  to  cover  it 
with  moist  earth  and  build  a  fire  on  top  of  the  mound 
to  bring  about  the  desired  steaming.  The  production 
of  fire  was  itself  an  art.  Whether  the  use  of  flint 
for  this  purpose  was  ever  general  among  the  red  men 
till  the  whites  introduced  them  to  it,  I  am  far  from 
sure ;  but  every  aged  Indian  who  has  talked  with  me 
about  the  customs  of  his  childhood  has  described  the 
use  of  the  fire-stick,  a  long  piece  of  wood  held  ver 
tically  between  the  palms  and  made  to  rotate  with 
great  velocity,  the  sharp  point  of  the  lower  end  being 
fitted  into  an  indentation  in  another  and  larger  piece 
laid  flat  on  the  ground.  Around  the  edge  of  the 
indentation  would  be  sprinkled  powdered  dry  grass, 
which  would  ignite  as  soon  as  the  friction  caused  by 
twirling  the  stick  had  evolved  a  spark. 

Not  only  bows  and  arrows  but  bludgeons  and  spear- 
handles  had  to  be  fashioned  of  wood  of  various  sorts, 
the  maker's  skill  being  put  to  proof  both  in  the  selec 
tion  of  the  material  and  in  its  preliminary  treatment 
and  final  shaping.  The  arrows  and  spears  had  to 
have  heads  of  stone;  and  a  favorite  war  weapon  was 
the  tomahawk,  a  crude  mixture  of  battle-ax  and  club, 
with  a  heavy  stone  blade  or  knob.  The  bow  must  be 
strung,  and  the  heads  of  the  other  appliances  securely 
fastened  to  the  shafts;  and  for  these,  as  for  all  pur 
poses  of  tying,  or  lashing,  or  sewing,  the  only  twine 
employed  was  made  of  the  sinews  of  some  large  ani 
mal,  like  a  deer.  The  seasoning  of  sinews,  and  their 
winding  and  knotting  while  in  the  best  state  of  plas 
ticity,  required  considerable  study.  In  short,  Laughs- 


24  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

at-the-Sky  had  to  be  educated  into  an  all-around 
artisan  while  still  young  and  adaptable.  His  sister, 
meanwhile,  was  drilled  in  the  common  household  du 
ties,  and  taught  how  to  tan  skins  and  sew  them 
together  for  clothing  and  tent-coverings,  not  omitting 
some  attention  to  the  decorative  side  of  her  work,  as 
a  preparation  for  becoming  mistress  of  the  camp  of 
her  future  husband. 

As  the  lad  grew  up,  he  was  fortified  for  the  more 
active  undertakings  of  manhood  by  subjection  to  va- 
j  rious  ordeals.  If  there  were  a  secret  society  in  his 
tribe  to  which  he  desired  admission,  he  had  to  pass 
through  an  initiatory  ceremonial  of  which  flogging, 
or  some  other  painful  bodily  experience,  was  a  promi 
nent  feature.  Or  possibly  he  might  be  sent  into  the 
wilderness  to  live  for  a  long  period,  entirely  isolated 
from  his  kind.  Here  he  was  supposed  to  commune 
with  the  spirits  of  earth  and  air,  and  to  give  his  mind 
the  necessary  philosophic  bent  by  silent  meditation 
and  self -scrutiny.  He  was  obliged  to  fast,  or  to 
subsist  on  wild  berries  and  barks,  being  permitted 
to  carry  with  him  neither  food  nor  any  weapon 
suitable  for  killing  game.  Indeed,  in  some,  tribes  it 
was  the  custom,  when  a  youth  on  the  verge  of  ma 
turity  was  sent  off  on  this  lonesome  errand,  to  pro 
claim  him  virtually  an  outlaw  for  the  time,  so  that 
any  one  who  chose  was  at  liberty  to  slay  him  and 
inherit  whatever  special  privileges  might  be  in  store 
for  him.  A  part  of  the  purpose  underlying  this  provi 
sion  appears  to  have  been  educative  in  a  very  prac 
tical  way,  since  the  person  undergoing  the  ordeal, 
appreciating  the  peril  to  which  he  was  exposed,  would 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  25 

draw  upon  all  his  mother-wit  to  study  out  plans  for 
concealment  and  escape  from  a  pursuing  enemy;  the 
resourcefulness  thus  acquired  might  one  day  stand  him 
in  excellent  stead  in  actual  warfare. 

Other  devices,  showing  great  ingenuity  in  the  con 
trivance  of  methods  of  torture,  were  conjured  up  with 
a  view  to  putting  the  youth's  courage,  and  the  steadi 
ness  of  his  nerves,  to  a  crucial  test,  before  which  he 
must  succumb  unless  divinely  marked  for  a  career. 
These  trials  also  cultivated  in  him,  if  he  proved 
worthy,  a  stolidity  of  demeanor  which  would  qualify 
him,  when  captured  alive  by  a  hostile  force,  to  defy 
them  to  their  faces,  exchange  taunt  for  taunt  with 
them,  and  chant  a  death-song  with  unfaltering  voice 
even  while  they  were  filling  his  body  with  arrows 
or  lighting  a  funeral  pyre  under  his  feet. 

Having  satisfied  the  elders  of  his  tribe  that  he  de 
served  their  confidence,  Laughs-at-the-Sky  was  admit 
ted  to  the  councils  in  which  measures  of  tribal  gov 
ernment  and  policy  were  discussed.  To  our  modern 
notion  these  gatherings  appear  very  informal,  but  they 
were  conducted  according  to  certain  unwritten  laws 
as  well  recognized  and  respected  as  our  familiar  code 
of  parliamentary  procedure.  The  general  rule, 
"  Young  men  for  action,  old  men  for  counsel,"  was 
uniformly  observed,  and  lay  at  the  basis  of  all  the 
proceedings.  The  old  men  opened  the  talk,  their 
juniors  keeping  quiet  till  the  last  of  the  patriarchs 
had  had  his  say.  As  might  be  imagined,  a  people  as 
close  to  nature  as  our  red  men  in  their  primitive  state 
made  large  use  of  natural  phenomena  in  their  figures 
of  speech,  and  drew  upon  these  continually  for  illus- 


26  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

trations  in  support  of  their  arguments.  The  practice 
gave  that  strong  poetic  and  picturesque  flavor  to  their 
oratory  which  so  deeply  impressed  the  minds  of  our 
early  white  explorers.  The  young  men,  it  is  almost 
needless  to  say,  were  more  fiery  than  the  old  ones. 
They  were,  as  a  rule,  ambitious  to  win  chieftainship 
by  waging  war,  or  raiding  a  rival  tribe,  whenever  a 
promising  opportunity  offered.  The  advice  of  the 
old  men  was  usually  in  the  direction  of  patience,  and 
a  careful  consideration  of  possible  consequences  be 
fore  taking  heavy  chances  with  a  foe  whose  strength 
was  unascertained. 

Whatever  may  be  our  opinion  of  his  manner  of 
expressing  it,  no  one  can  deny  that  the  primitive 
Indian  had  a  deeply  religious  nature.  As  he  recog 
nized  the  divine  essence  in  everything  about  him,  he 
embarked  on  no  enterprise  without  invoking  the  ap 
proval  and  assistance  of  the  Deity,  and  this  custom 
was  carried  to  extreme  lengths  now  and  then.  To  our 
minds,  for  instance,  there  is  something  fatally  incon 
gruous  in  the  idea  of  asking  a  blessing  upon  an  expedi 
tion,  under  cover  of  night,  to  steal  a  hostile  neigh 
bor's  property.  But,  according  to  the  code  of  the 
ancient  Americans,  an  enemy  was  fair  prey  at  all 
times;  any  damage  which  could  not  be  done  to  him 
in  open  combat  might  be  done  just  as  well  on  the  sly, 
since  the  rule  of  their  competition  was  not  only  force 
for  force,  but  trick  for  trick.  For  a  hunting  party 
there  was  always  a  devotional  exercise  by  way  of 
preparation;  but  the  great  occasion  for  such  a  demon 
stration  was  the  outset  of  a  band  of  warriors  for 
the  field  of  battle.  Before  eating  and  before  sleeping, 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  27 

every  man  was  instructed  to  pray  for  strength  for 
himself  and  the  common  victory,  and  the  leader  must 
offer  sacrifices  for  his  whole  command.  Often  a  war 
party  would  continue  all  night  in  prayer,  and  burn 
incense  of  pine  gum  and  sweet  grass  to  purify  them 
selves.  Any  one  of  the  number  who  wished  to  render 
his  petitions  particularly  acceptable  might  make  a 
sacrifice  of  some  of  his  own  hair  or  flesh,  or  scourge 
and  stab  himself  till  the  blood  flowed  copiously,  or 
even  apply  red-hot  coals  to  his  skin  without  wincing, 
to  prove  his  worthiness. 

So,  as  Laughs-at-the-Sky  bloomed  into  full  man 
hood  and  began  to  take  his  share  in  the  work  of  his 
tribe,  he  found  himself  in  a  religious  atmosphere 
which  could  not  fail  to  have  its  effect  on  him  through 
out  his  later  life.  Dancing  was  almost  invariably  an 
accompaniment  of  invocations  of  divine  favor.  The 
Indian  dance  was  a  wholly  different  thing  from  any 
performance  of  the  same  name  among  our  people. 
There  was  nothing  at  all  graceful  about  it,  and  pair 
ing  off  the  sexes  was  unknown.  In  many  of  the 
dances  the  women  bore  no  part,  unless  it  might  be 
to  join  in  the  singing;  to  others  they  contributed  some 
motion,  perhaps  standing  in  a  circle  and  alternately 
rising  on  the  balls  of  their  feet  and  settling  back 
again,  as  they  turned  slowly  around  and  around  in 
time  with  the  music;  this  was  vocal,  punctuated  with 
rhythmic  beats  on  the  tom-tom  and  shakes  of  the 
rattle. 

Most  of  the  dances  were  symbolic,  and  not  infre 
quently  the  symbolism  involved  those  mysteries  of 
nature  which  our  modern  taste  reserves  for  the  pri- 


28  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

vacy  of  very  intimate  intercourse.  No  such  discrimi 
nations  disturbed  the  mind  of  the  aborigine.  His  fables 
gave  animal  attributes  to  the  sun  and  the  earth  and 
the  rain,  and  wove  a  conceit,  half  poetic  and  half 
literal,  about  the  scattering  of  the  seed,  and  the  ger 
mination  and  development  of  the  plant,  and  the  grad 
ual  maturing  of  the  fruit,  which  was  interpreted  in 
dramatic  symbols  in  some  of  his  dances  in  celebration 
of  the  spring  sowing  and  the  autumn  harvest.  It 
is  on  such  typifications  that  most  of  the  objections 
to  Indian  dances  first  arose.  Other  grounds  for  dis 
approving  them  I  shall  notice  elsewhere. 

In  due  course,  Laughs-at-the-Sky  followed  the  cus 
tom  of  his  people,  and  sought  a  wife.  How  he  went 
about  his  courtship  depended  on  what  tribe  he  be 
longed  to,  for  every  group  of  Indians  had  its  own 
way  of  doing  such  things.  In  nearly  all  instances 
the  preliminary  arrangements  were  conducted  by  the 
parents  of  the  young  man.  The  proposal  of  marriage 
might  be  suggested  by  him,  but  his  family  sat  in 
council  over  the  matter.  If  they  liked  the  girl  he 
had  chosen  and  thought  the  union  between  the  two 
families  desirable,  they  opened  negotiations  with  the 
parents  of  the  girl,  and  on  her  side  in  turn  a  do 
mestic  council  took  the  question  under  consideration. 
All  going  well,  the  next  thing  was  to  announce  the 
approaching  wedding  in  the  camp.  There  were  no 
newspapers  in  which  to  advertise  it,  so  it  sometimes 
fell  to  the  girl  herself  to  do  this  by  carrying  every 
day  to  the  tent  in  which  the  young  man  lived  a  por 
tion  of  food  of  her  own  cooking,  which  she  laid  be 
fore  him  as  she  expected  to  continue  laying  food 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  29 

before  him  through  their  married  lives  together.  Or, 
in  those  tribes  in  which  the  woman  owned  the  dwell 
ing,  and  the  bridegroom  attached  himself  to  the  bride's 
family  instead  of  making  the  bride  a  part  of  his, 
this  order  would  be  reversed,  the  young  man  visiting  p 
the  girl's  home  bearing  tributes  of  one  kind  or  an 
other  till  the  day  arrived  for  the  actual  nuptials.  Be 
yond  a  feast  or  some  similar  social  gathering,  there 
was  rarely  any  specific  celebration  of  the  marriage, 
certainly  no  solemn  ceremony  like  that  to  which  we 
are  accustomed.  Wedding  gifts  were  commonly  abun-  < 
dant,  the  friends  of  both  families  trying  to  set  the 
young  couple  up  with  all  the  practical  necessaries  of 
housekeeping. 

In  some  tribes,  marriage  by  purchase  was  the  rule. 
The  young  man's  family  would  present  the  young 
woman's  family  with  handsome  gifts  in  considera 
tion  of  their  consent  to  the  match;  and,  although  it 
was  often  denied  in  later  years  that  this  was  the  price 
paid  for  the  bride,  a  pretty  sure  sign  that  it  was 
appears  in  the  fact  that,  in  some  of  these  tribes, 
even  to  our  day,  the  return  of  part  or  all  of  the  gifts 
is  demanded  in  case  the  woman  tires  of  her  husband 
and  leaves  him.  Divorce  was  about  as  simple  a  mat 
ter  as  marriage.  Among  certain  groups  of  Indians 
the  husband's  will  in  such  affairs  was  law,  and  the 
woman  was  cast  off  without  further  ado,  and  without 
the  necessity  of  assigning  a  cause.  Among  others, 
the  man  was  powerless,  but  the  wife  could  divorce 
him  and  turn  him  out  of  their  dwelling  on  any  pre 
text  she  chose.  Between  these  extreme  cases  came 
a  few  where  either  party  who  was  dissatisfied  would 


50  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

simply  slip  out  of  the  house  without  warning,  and  the 
party  thus  deserted  was  thenceforth  free  to  choose  an 
other  mate. 

No  family  can  hope  to  escape  illness  altogether,  and 
the  household  of  Laughs-at-the-Sky  and  his  wife  was 
not  free  from  it.  For  obvious  reasons  their  troubles 
were  not  of  the  sort  which  flow  from  over-indulgence 
in  rich  foods,  or  from  lack  of  fresh  air  and  exercise, 
but  grew  out  of  imprudences  and  accidents  hardly 
separable  from  such  a  life  as  they  led  in  the  wilds. 
No  family  physician  and  no  telephone  being  available, 
a  messenger  was  sent  to  the  nearest  medicine-man, 
who,  under  the  inspiration  of  gifts  of  great  value, 
proceeded  to  perform  various  incantations  over  the 
patient,  sometimes  accompanied  by  the  songs  and 
dances  of  a  party  of  Indians  called  in  for  the  pur 
pose.  Simple  ailments  this  practitioner  could  handle 
very  well.  Although,  for  the  sake  of  keeping  up  the 
illusion  as  to  his  magical  powers,  he  would  go  through 
a  deal  of  mummery  which  had  no  outward  relation 
to  the  disorder  he  had  been  bidden  to  cure,  he  showed 
much  skill  in  administering  cathartics,  soporifics,  ton 
ics,  sweating  medicines,  expectorants,  kidney  excitants, 
emetics,  and  poultices  for  inflamed  mucous  surfaces. 
All  his  most  valuable  medicines  he  prepared  from 
herbs  and  roots  found  in  waste  places,  which  had 
been  proved  by  experiment  through  several  genera 
tions  to  be  capable  of  producing  certain  definite  ef 
fects.  He  knew  also  how  to  extract  barbed  arrows 
from  the  flesh,  reduce  sprains,  and  dress  open  wounds, 
though  he  had  no  idea  how  to  set  a  broken  bone  so 
as  to  insure  his  patient  against  permanent  crippling. 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  SI 

If  the  malady  were  internal  but  refused  to  yield 
to  the  crude  medicaments  at  his  command,  the  medi 
cine-man  would  probably  tell  the  patient  that  his  suf 
ferings  were  caused  by  an  invisible  bear  or  other 
fierce  brute  which  was  gnawing  at  his  vitals.  This 
evil  spirit  could  be  frightened  away  only  by  a  noisy 
and  pretty  expensive  ceremony  of  exorcism.  The  din 
of  the  ordeal  would  have  driven  a  normal  person  of 
our  race  half  frantic,  but  the  patient  and  his  family 
were  willing  to  endure  anything  for  the  sake  of  the 
promised  benefit.  When  a  victim  survived  it  and  re 
covered,  the  sorcerer  attributed  the  happy  outcome  to 
his  own  necromantic  arts;  if  not,  he  declared  the  fail 
ure  due  to  his  having  been  called  in  too  late,  after 
a  mortal  injury  had  been  inflicted  by  the  controlling 
demon. 

On  one  of  the  forays  of  his  tribe,  Laughs-at-the- 
Sky  perhaps  performed  some  exploit  of  uncommon 
valor,  like  wrenching  from  the  grasp  of  an  antag 
onist,  in  a  hand-to-hand  struggle  on  the  battle-field, 
a  huge  bow  made  of  elk's  horn,  so  heavy  and  so  stiff 
that  none  but  its  owner,  a  man  of  giant  strength, 
had  ever  before  been  able  to  use  it.  Laughs-at-the 
Sky  astonished  his  comrades  as  well  as  the  enemy 
by  bending  it  and  sending  a  deadly  arrow  through 
the  body  of  the  warrior  from  whom  he  had  wrested 
it,  and  who  had  started  to  flee  immediately  upon 
the  loss  of  the  weapon.  Thenceforward  our  hero  was 
known  among  his  fellows  no  longer  by  the  name  given 
him  at  his  birth,  but  as  "  the  young  man  who  captured 
the  big  bow  " — or,  by  a  literal  translation  of  the  In 
dian  contraction  for  this  phrase,  as  Young-Big-Bow. 


32  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

It  is  not  essential  to  our  present  purpose  to  follow 
him  through  all  the  adventures  and  experiences  of  his 
later  life,  which  merely  rang  the  changes  on  hunt 
ing  and  warfare,  warfare  and  hunting.  The  next  dis 
tinctive  event  in  his  history  was  its  finale.  He  had 
grown  old  slowly,  but  had  not  failed  to  realize  the 
passing  of  his  powers,  and  at  last  found  himself  face 
to  face  with  death.  There  was  nothing  terrifying  to 
him  in  the  discovery.  Many  of  his  old  friends  had 
gone  this  way  before,  and  he  was  ready  for  his  sum 
mons  to  fall  into  the  procession.  As  he  felt  the  end 
approaching  he  gathered  his  family  about  him  for  a 
leave-taking.  There  was  no  lawyer  to  draw  his  will; 
but  by  word  of  mouth  he  disposed  of  his  most  cher 
ished  treasures — the  bow  and  arrows  he  had  stripped 
from  the  chieftain  slain  by  his  own  hand,  his  shield 
of  buffalo  hide,  the  decorated  spear  he  had  inherited' 
from  his  father,  his  war-bonnet  gorgeous  with  stained 
eagle-feathers,  the  tools  of  wood  and  stone  he  had 
employed  in  his  simple  handicrafts.  Then  those  who 
were  nearest  and  dearest  to  him  fulfilled  their  part 
ing  offices.  They  oiled  and  combed  and  braided  his 
hair,  painted  his  face  with  a  red  pigment,  brought  new 
clothing  in  which  to  wrap  his  form,  and  provided  gen 
erally  for  his  meeting  the  coming  visitant  with  proper 
dignity. 

As  he  closed  his  eyes  upon  the  scenes  of  earth, 
he  had  the  vision-laden  hour  which  comes  to  all  man 
kind  while  the  body  is  loosing  its  hold  on  the  spirit. 
But  the  pictures  which  rose  before  his  mind  were  not 
of  a  splendid  city  with  streets  of  gold  and  gates  of 
pearl,  or  of  a  river  on  whose  opposite  bank  the  father 


THE  ABORIGINAL  RED  MAN  33 

and  mother,  the  wife  and  children  who  had  already 
crossed  were  waiting  to  welcome  him.  What  he  saw 
was  a  peaceful  plain  of  green  prairie-grass,  where  the 
game  was  always  plentiful  and  fat,  and  the  tents  of 
a  happy  people  dotted  the  foreground  with  pyramids 
of  white  and  gray.  This  favored  spot  may  have  been 
somewhere  above  the  clouds,  but  surely  in  the  direc 
tion  of  the  setting  sun,  and  possibly  beyond  the  great 
seas  which  bounded  his  western  horizon  with  a  bar 
rier  of  mystery.  Many  and  many  a  time,  as  he  was 
returning  to  his  camp  after  a  day's  absence,  he  had 
watched  the  sun  sinking  to  rest  and  the  soft  mists 
rising  between  him  and  it,  and  wondered  what  lay 
beyond.  It  was  a  wonder  mixed  never  with  fear  but 
always  with  confidence.  Such  a  thing  as  atheism  was 
unknown  among  the  red  men.  They  were  content  not 
to  define  the  character  and  qualities  of  the  Great 
Spirit  who  absorbed  and  animated  all  the  lesser  spir 
its  in  nature,  but  to  rest  calm  in  the  assurance  that 
whatever  the  future  held  in  store  for  them  had  been 
ordered  for  their  well-being. 

It  may  be  that  hours,  or  days,  or  even  weeks  elapsed 
between  the  preparations  for  death  and  its  actual  com 
ing.  When,  however,  the  old  man  had  heaved  his 
last  sigh,  the  assembled  mourners  began  their  wail 
ing.  His  closest  friends  cut  their  hair  short  at  the 
neck,  and  gashed  their  bodies  with  knives  in  token 
of  their  grief.  Some  went  so  far  as  to  cut  off  two 
or  three  fingers  at  the  first  joint,  so  that  the  maimed 
hand  might  keep  them  always  in  memory  of  their  loss. 
One  group  of  mourners  stayed  near  the  body,  chant 
ing  and  groaning;  another  sought  an  elevated  point 


II 

THE  RED  MAN  AND  THE 
GOVERNMENT 


He  that  ruleth  over  men  must  be  just.— 2  Samuel  23  13. 

Brothers,  we  have  seen  how  great  a  people  the  whites  are. 
They  are  very  rich  and  very  strong.  It  is  folly  for  us  to  fight 
them.  We  shall  go  home  with  much  knowledge.  For  myself, 
I  shall  advise  my  people  to  be  quiet  and  live  like  good  men. 
The  advice  which  you  gave  us,  brother,  is  very  good,  and  we 
tell  you  now  we  intend  to  walk  the  straight  path  in  future,  and 
to  content  ourselves  with  what  we  have,  and  with  cultivating 
our  lands.— BLACK  HAWK,  the  Sauk  Leader. 


II 

THE  RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT 

A /THOUGH  the  red  men  within  the  United 
States  proper — that  is,  in  the  area  bounded  by 
Canada  and  Mexico  and  the  two  great  oceans — 
number  about  one  in  every  three  hundred  of  the  total 
population,  the  federal  government  has  not,  till  within 
very  recent  years,  had  an  Indian  policy  worthy  the 
name.  After  the  war  of  the  Revolution,  the  tend 
ency  of  the  white  people  to  move  from  the  eastern 
coast  westward  suggested  the  importance  of  estab 
lishing  definite  relations  with  those  tribes  that  might 
oppose  their  progress,  but  nobody  appears  to  have 
mapped  out  a  comprehensive  plan  of  procedure.  In 
a  broad  way,  the  idea  was  to  hold  peace  parleys  with 
all  alike;  then,  those  who  showed  a  hospitable  spirit 
were  to  be  kept  in  good  humor  by  gifts,  and  instructed 
in  agriculture  and  kindred  arts;  those  who  were  un 
friendly,  but  not  powerful  enough  to  drive  back  the 
white  immigrants,  were  to  be  subdued  by  warfare  and 
civilized  in  captivity;  and  those  with  whom  it  seemed 
impracticable  to  do  anything  else  were  to  be  destroyed, 
root  and  branch.  The  first  step  in  this  crude  pro 
gram  called  for  the  negotiation  of  "  treaties." 

Following  a  practice  begun  by  the  several  colonies 
in  earliest  times,   the  tribes  were   dealt  with  as  so 


40  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

many  independent  "  nations,"  whose  "  kings "  were 
qualified  to  make  and  receive  pledges  for  them; 
and  the  treaties  bear  evidence,  in  their  grandiose 
phraseology,  of  the  solemnity  which  the  government 
of  the  new  republic  wished  to  attach  to  their  con 
tents.  Most  of  these  instruments  concerned  ces 
sions  of  lands  which  the  government  had  recog 
nized,  formally  at  least,  the  right  of  the  Indians  to 
occupy.  Of  course,  in  a  country  unsurveyed  and 
largely  unknown  to  the  invading  race,  the  descrip 
tions  of  the  ceded  tracts  needs  must  be  inexact  and 
unsatisfactory.  The  difference  between  the  English 
tongue,  with  its  copious  vocabulary  and  its  abunda'nt 
provisions  for  expressing  delicate  shades  of  meaning, 
and  the  rough,  elemental  languages  of  the  Indians, 
who  had  no  written  forms  and  whose  main  use  for 
words  was  to  make  a  few  simple  wants  known  to 
each  other,  further  complicated  the  work  of  treaty- 
making;  so  that  the  product,  if  later  events  required 
its  more  careful  analysis,  was  found  often  to  con 
vey  one  meaning  to  the  Indian  negotiators  and  quite 
another  to  the  whites.  When  we  add  to  these  diffi 
culties  the  fact  that  not  seldom  the  honesty  of  the 
interpreters  employed  was  open  to  question,  we  can 
see  why  many  of  the  cases  in  which  the  government 
has  been  charged  with  deliberate  duplicity  are  capable 
of  explanation  as  the  result  of  misunderstandings. 

Another  feature  of  these  transactions,  which  were 
always  perilous  and  occasionally  tragic,  was  the  igno 
rance  of  the  Indians  regarding  the  lawful  methods  of 
our  government.  A  treaty  with  them  was  entered 
into,  on  behalf  of  the  United  States,  by  the  President, 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       41 

but,  as  in  the  case  of  treaties  with  foreign  powers, 
required  ratification  by  the  Senate,  and  sometimes  the 
passage  of  an  act  of  Congress,  before  it  could  become 
effective.  In  one  notable  instance,  in  California,  a 
large  number  of  Indians  signed  away  their  homes  on 
the  understanding  that  the  government  was  to  provide 
them  with  others,  but  the  Senate  postponed  action 
on  the  treaties;  the  Indians,  assuming  that  the  pre 
liminaries  were  complete,  proceeded  to  move  out;  a 
land-hungry  mob  of  whites  at  once  moved  in  and 
took  possession;  and  the  Indians  became  wanderers, 
homeless  and  hopeless,  because  the  executive  branch 
of  the  government  had  not  the  courage  to  interfere 
and  drive  the  white  squatters  away  till  the  Senate 
could  find  time  to  act  and  other  habitations  for  the 
red  men  could  be  hunted  up.  As  it  was,  the  Senate 
never  did  act;  the  treaties  were  discovered  among  a 
lot  of  other  dust-covered  rubbish  in  its  pigeon-holes 
many  years  afterward,  and  a  part  of  my  adminis 
tration  was  spent  in  buying  such  homes  as  we  could 
for  the  unfortunates  who  had  been  without  any  for 
a  whole  generation. 

The  practice  of  treaty-making  finally  became  so 
sorry  a  farce  that  Congress  abolished  it  by  law;  and 
since  1871  "agreements"  have  taken  the  place  of 
treaties  in  dealings  between  the  government  and  the 
Indians.  It  is  hard  for  any  one  with  a  conscience 
which  takes  more  note  of  principles  than  of  phrases, 
to  see  what  distinction  can  fairly  be  drawn  here;  but 
what  actually  happened  was  that  Congress  began  to 
take  all  sorts  of  liberties  with  such  negotiations  from 
that  day  forward.  The  agreements  were  always 


4S  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

framed  at  councils  between  certain  white  negotiators 
and  the  leaders  of  a  tribe,  and  then  sent  to  Congress 
for  its  action.  If  Congress  was  not  satisfied  with 
the  form  in  which  an  agreement  was  drawn,  instead 
of  sending  it  back  to  the  parties  who  drew  it  and 
advising  that  such-and-such  changes  be  made  in  the 
text,  it  would  simply  make  the  changes  itself  with 
out  consulting  anybody,  and  pass  a  bill  "  to  ratify 
an  agreement  with  "  the  tribe,  as  if  the  contents  of 
the  bill  were  the  same  as  the  contents  of  the  agree 
ment.  Naturally,  this  was  not  to  the  taste  of  the 
Indians  concerned;  and  when  it  had  gone  on  for  some 
thirty  years  in  disregard  of  repeated  protests,  an  es 
pecially  flagrant  case  brought  about  a  momentous  law 
suit.  An  act  was  passed,  ostensibly  to  ratify  an  agree 
ment  with  the  Kiowa,  Comanche,  and  Apache  Indians, 
opening  to  settlement  a  large  part  of  their  lands,  and, 
as  this  legislation  embodied  sundry  features  abso 
lutely  at  variance  with  the  agreement  it  purported  to 
confirm,  the  Indian  Rights  Association  raised  a  test 
case  by  trying  to  sue  out  an  injunction.  The  fight 
was  carried  all  the  way  up  to  the  Supreme  Court, 
which  decided,  on  January  5,  1903,  that  "  the  power 
exists  [in  Congress]  to  abrogate  the  provisions  of  an 
Indian  treaty,"  and  that  "  its  action  is  conclusive " 
beyond  the  power  of  the  judicial  arm  of  the  govern 
ment  to  intervene.  Since  that  day  no  time  and  energy 
have  been  squandered  on  making  agreements  with  In 
dians  for  cessions  of  land  or  anything  else,  but  Con 
gress  legislates  regarding  their  so-called  property  as 
freely  as  if  it  belonged  unreservedly  to  the  govern 
ment. 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       43 

Owing  to  the  hostile  clashes  which  were  continually 
occurring  between  the  white  communities  and  the  red 
men  on  the  frontier,  the  handling  of  Indian  affairs 
at  large  was  at  the  outset  entrusted  to  the  War  De 
partment.  From  the  foundation  of  the  government 
till  1824  the  Secretary  of  War  dealt  with  the  In 
dians  directly;  but  in  that  year  he  organized  a  Bureau 
of  Indian  Affairs  within  his  department.  With  vari 
ous  minor  changes,  this  arrangement  continued  till 
1849,  when  the  Department  of  the  Interior  was  cre 
ated  and  the  Indian  Bureau  was  transferred  to  it, 
with  a  Commissioner  at  its  head  whose  appointment 
was  vested  in  the  President  and  subject  to  confirma 
tion  by  the  Senate.  Up  to  that  time  the  chief  work 
of  the  Bureau  had  consisted  of  regulating  trade  be 
tween  whites  and  Indians,  making  such  distributions 
of  goods  and  money  to  the  several  tribes  as  the  gov 
ernment  had  promised  them,  and  trying  to  maintain 
friendly  relations,  with  an  occasional  draft  upon  the 
army  for  assistance.  This  will  account  for  many  of 
the  incongruous  provisions  in  old  laws  affecting  In 
dian  relations,  which,  though  dead  letters  for  all  prac 
tical  purposes,  remain  still  unrepealed.  To  a  person 
who  should  read  the  existing  statutes  at  length  with 
out  knowing  the  history  behind  them,  they  would  be 
almost  unintelligible.  They  need  a  thorough  overhaul 
ing  by  a  commission  of  experts,  and  reduction  to  a 
compact  and  comprehensive  code.  As  they  stand  now, 
there  is  not  a  duty  they  require  the  government  to  per 
form  which  can  safely  be  undertaken  without  first 
running  back  through  the  records  to  ascertain  whether 
it  is  assignable  to  the  President,  to  the  Secretary  of 


44  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

the  Interior,  to  the  Secretary  of  War,  to  the  Com 
missioner  of  Indian  Affairs,  to  two  of  these  officers 
jointly,  or  to  one  with  the  approval  or  at  the  instance 
of  another. 

Sometimes  a  subject  is  so  muddled  as  to  suggest 
possibilities  of  a  sensational  conflict  of  authority.  For 
example :  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  one  of  whose 
duties  is  to  distribute  funds  due  to  Indian  tribes,  is 
forbidden  to  make  such  a  distribution  when  there  is 
reason  "to  believe  there  is  any  species  of  intoxicating 
liquors  within  convenient  reach  of  the  Indians  " ;  but 
it  is  the  War  Department,  and  not  the  Department 
of  the  Interior,  that  is  empowered  to  grant  permits 
for  carrying  liquor  into  the  Indian  country;  while 
the  duty  of  removing  from  a  reservation  any  person 
whose  presence  there  seems  "  detrimental  to  the  peace 
and  welfare  of  the  Indians  "  devolves  upon  the  Com 
missioner. 

Now,  imagine  what  might  happen  if  the  Secretary 
of  the  Interior  wished  to  make  a  payment  to  the 
Indians  on  a  certain  reservation,  but  learned  that  there 
were  intoxicating  liquors  on  the  ground,  in  the  pos 
session  of  somebody  who  held  a  permit  from  the  Sec 
retary  of  War.  The  payment  might  be  overdue,  and 
the  Indians  might  be  restless  and  liable  to  make 
trouble  unless  they  received  their  money  promptly ;  yet 
the  Secretary  of  the  Interior  would  have  no  actual 
right  to  drive  off  the  owners  of  the  liquor  as  persons 
whose  presence  was  detrimental  to  the  peace  and  wel 
fare  of  the  tribe,  that  function  being  not  his  but  the 
Commissioner's.  If  the  Commissioner  were  unwilling 
to  act,  the  Secretary  would  have  no  right  to  issue 


m 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       45 

a  peremptory  command  to  him  regarding  a  matter 
which  the  statute  places  primarily  in  his  discretion; 
if  the  Secretary  should  issue  such  a  command  and 
the  Commissioner  should  refuse  to  obey  it,  the  Sec 
retary  is  not  empowered  to  dismiss  or  otherwise  pun 
ish  him  for  contumacy,  because  he  is  the  President's 
and  not  the  Secretary's  appointee.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  Commissioner  sympathized  with  the  Secre 
tary's  desire  to  rid  the  reservation  of  the  presence 
of  persons  with  liquor  in  their  possession,  and  set 
in  motion  the  proceedings  for  doing  this,  we  should 
be  treated  to  the  spectacle  of  a  subordinate  officer 
issuing  an  order,  with  the  approval  of  one  member 
of  the  President's  Cabinet,  overriding  the  order  of 
another  Cabinet  member  issued  under  the  sanction 
of  an  act  of  Congress.  Of  course,  this  is  only  a 
hypothetical  case,  unlikely  ever  to  happen;  but  it 
would  nevertheless  be  entirely  possible  under  the  ab 
surd  patchwork  of  law  which  has  been  continued 
in  force  long  after  the  conditions  that  called  its  in 
consistencies  into  being  have  passed  away.  I  have 
chosen  it  from  among  a  multitude  of  illustrations 
which  might  be  cited,  because  it  will  explain  in  some 
degree  the  demand  for  a  thorough  revision  of  exist 
ing  statutes.  Not  till  this  modernizing  process  is  com 
plete  shall  we  be  able,  when  anything  goes  wrong, 
to  place  the  blame  promptly  at  the  door  where  it 
belongs. 

Although  the  Commissioner  is  next  in  official  rank 
to  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  the  latter  has  his 
staff  of  Inspectors  whose  duty  it  is  to  keep  him  in 
formed  of  what  is  going  on  in  and  under  the  Indian 


46  IN  RED  MAN^S  LAND 

Bureau,  including  the  conduct  of  the  Commissioner 
himself.  Under  the  Commissioner,  in  turn,  is  a  staff 
of  secondary  inspecting  officers,  known  variously  as 
Supervisors  and  Special  Agents,  through  whom  he 
derives  his  information  of  how  things  are  moving 
in  the  outside  field.  Substantially  the  whole  Indian 
population,  as  we  shall  see  later,  is  settled  on  reserva 
tions.  Over  every  reservation  presides  a  functionary 
who  in  old  times  was  known  as  an  Indian  Agent,  and 
who  was  appointed  by  the  President  with  the  concur 
rence  of  the  Senate.  By  degrees  the  civil  service  rules 
have  been  applied  to  Indian  agencies,  and  the  functions 
assigned  to  Agents  are  now  performed  by  Superin 
tendents  of  local  Indian  schools,  whose  appointments, 
promotions,  and  transfers  are  made,  or  are  supposed 
to  be  made,  on  grounds  of  merit  alone.  The  purpose 
of  this  change  was  to  remove  the  Indian  service  from 
the  domination  of  partisan  politics,  with  the  incidental 
abuses  thereof.  While  such  evils  may  not  have  been 
eliminated  under  the  new  regime,  they  have  undoubt 
edly  been  reduced  to  a  minimum,  partly  by  narrow 
ing  the  openings  for  wrongdoing,  partly  by  procuring 
a  higher  average  class  of  men  for  the  positions,  and 
partly  by  bringing  the  whole  force  more  closely  under 
the  control  of  the  Secretary,  who  makes  the  appoint 
ments  and  administers  penalties  for  malfeasance. 
Also,  it  has  had  a  salutary  influence  on  the  Indians 
by  associating  in  their  minds  the  educational  system 
with  the  sources  of  general  authority. 

It  is  in  order  now  to  go  back  and  see  how  the 
Indians  became  possessed  of  specific  reservations,  in 
stead  of  roaming  at  large  over  all  the  western  wil- 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       47 

derness  as  of  old.  Indian  reservations  are  areas  set 
apart  by  the  government  for  the  sole  occupancy  of 
a  tribe  or  tribes,  or  of  one  or  more  fragments  of 
tribes,  the  land  in  every  reservation  being,  at  the 
outset,  held  in  common  by  the  tribal  members.  This 
system  was  established  originally  as  an  expedient  for 
pushing  Indian  disturbers  out  of  the  path  of  white 
immigration  and  permitting  the  peaceful  development 
of  new  country  by  the  incomers.  The  belief  was  gen 
eral,  in  the  earlier  half  of  the  last  century,  that  the  only 
way  to  avoid  collisions  between  the  white  and  the  red 
races  was  to  keep  them  as  far  apart  as  possible;  and 
some  of  our  statesmen  of  that  period  entertained  the 
hope  that  the  more  progressive  Indians  had  already 
absorbed  enough  of  the  spirit  which  animated  the 
white  citizens  to  wish  to  imitate  them  in  self-govern 
ment.  So  an  experiment  on  a  large  scale  was  under 
taken  by  carving  out  of  the  public  domain  an  "  In 
dian  Territory  "  some  distance  west  of  the  Mississippi 
River,  transporting  thither  five  tribes  which  had  been 
occupying  lands  in  five  of  the  southeastern  states,  and 
setting  them  up  in  business  as  a  sort  of  red  men's 
republic.  The  place  chosen  was,  at  that  time,  so  far 
beyond  where  anybody  dreamed  that  our  civilization 
would  ever  extend,  that  it  was  assumed  the  Indians 
would  always  be  free  from  interference  by  other 
races. 

The  attempt  proved  a  dismal  failure.  The  Indians 
showed  no  natural  inclination  to  self-rule,  at  least 
in  the  form  prescribed  for  them;  the  government's 
proclamation  that  they  were  to  be  independent  was 
an  invitation  to  every  white  outlaw  in  the  Southwest, 


48  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

fleeing  from  justice  in  any  of  the  states,  to  take  refuge 
in  Indian  Territory  as  the  one  place  where  he  could 
be  secure  from  arrest;  and  by  degrees  the  condition 
of  things  there  became  so  unbearably  corrupt  and  dan 
gerous  that  the  government  was  forced  to  make  a  com 
plete  reorganization.  This  was  done  under  the  forms 
of  agreements  negotiated  with  the  five  tribes;  but 
actually  it  was  a  plain  taking-over  of  the  territory, 
its  reduction  to  the  status  of  other  territories,  and 
finally  its  erection  into  a  state,  under  the  name 
Oklahoma. 

The  other  tribes  had  in  the  meantime  been  distrib 
uted  through  the  great  West  on  reservations,  where 
no  attempt  was  made  to  teach  them  self-government, 
but  where  they  could  more  easily  be  kept  out  of 
trouble  among  themselves,  protected  against  the  evil 
designs  of  outsiders  if  their  Agents  were  active  and 
honest,  and  instructed  in  farming  by  teachers  ap 
pointed  by  the  Bureau  in  Washington.  This  plan, 
however,  proved  as  mistaken  on  the  side  of  excessive 
paternalism  as  the  Indian  Territory  experiment  had 
on  the  side  of  excessive  liberty.  Congress  fell  into 
the  habit  of  legislating  about  details  which  might  bet 
ter  have  been  left  to  the  judgment  of  the  adminis 
trative  officers  in  charge,  though  persistently  refusing 
or  neglecting  to  provide  by  law  the  means  of  handling 
certain  crises  of  real  importance  which  were  liable  to 
occur  without  warning.  As  a  bribe  to  the  Indians 
to  remain  quiet,  rations  of  food  and  clothing,  or 
sums  of  money  were  distributed  among  them  at 
certain  intervals.  Between  the  necessity  for  buying 
all  the  material  supplies  by  contract,  and  the  fact 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       49 

that,  when  money  was  given,  the  Indians  were  igno 
rant  of  how  much  should  come  to  them,  or  how  to 
count  it  after  payment,  or  how  to  receipt  for  it  except 
with  a  cross-mark  of  whose  significance  they  had  only 
the  most  hazy  notion,  this  system  presently  became 
a  prolific  breeder  of  scandals,  in  which  figured  the 
bad  quality  of  goods  furnished,  false  weights  and 
measures,  favoritism  in  the  distributions,  and  the  jug 
gling  of  accounts.  For  many  years  the  agencies  were 
so  far  from  civilization  that  inspection  was  imprac 
ticable,  except  at  rare  intervals,  and  investigations 
were  almost  prohibitively  expensive.  And  not  only 
did  the  Indians  become  pauperized  through  their  gra 
tuities,  but  they  learned  the  trick  of  stirring  the  gov 
ernment  to  greater  liberality  now  and  then  by  threats 
of  a  bloody  outbreak. 

In  size,  reservations  varied  from  a  few  hundred  acres 
to  several  million.  Of  those  which  are  left  still  un 
broken,  the  Navajo  reservation  in  Arizona,  New 
Mexico,  and  Utah  is  the  largest,  embracing  nearly 
fifteen  thousand  square  miles.  They  differ  quite  as 
widely  in  fertility  of  soil  and  mineral  wealth,  the 
Osage  reservation  being  thus  far  the  richest  for  agri 
culture,  stock-raising,  and  oil  production.  When  a 
body  of  Indians  were  settled  on  a  reservation  they 
were  forbidden  to  leave  it,  except  on  written  passes 
issued  by  their  Agent,  and  all  outsiders  were  forbid 
den  to  enter  it  unless  they  had  first  made  their  busi 
ness  known  and  received  express  permission.  Trade 
within  a  reservation  was  restricted  with  equal  care. 
Any  resident  Indian  might  buy,  or  sell,  or  barter  to 
his  heart's  content,  but  white  merchants  were  allowed 


50  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

to  set  up  stores  only  by  special  license.  The  privilege 
was  a  monopoly  granted  to  but  few  in  any  event; 
and  those  few  must  produce,  as  a  prerequisite,  proofs 
of  good  character  and  financial  responsibility,  and 
give  bond  to  obey  the  laws  and  regulations.  In  re 
cent  years  the  West  has  been  so  much  more  closely 
settled  that  these  rules  have  been  relaxed,  and  Indians 
are  generally  encouraged  to  do  their  trading  in  nearby 
towns  which  offer  any  advantages  over  the  licensed 
stores;  so  the  reservation  privilege  has  fallen  in  fa 
vor  and  is  little  sought. 

As  the  President  could  not  possibly  know  person 
ally  all  the  Agents  he  had  to  appoint,  he  fell  back 
upon  the  Senators  and  Representatives  for  recom 
mendations  of  fit  men,  and  thus  grew  up  a  vicious 
practice  of  patronage.  By  this  I  do  not  mean  that 
all,  or  even  a  majority,  of  the  appointees  were  morally 
bad  men;  but  citizens  who  could  be  sure  of  a  good 
living  by  their  independent  efforts  at  home  were,  as 
a  rule,  loath  to  go  away  from  everything  they  prized 
and  bury  themselves  in  the  wilds  for  a  brief  term  of 
years  at  salaries  contemptibly  small.  Hence,  it  is  not 
wonderful  that  so  many  candidates  for  agencies  were 
minor  politicians  whose  chief  claim  to  notice  was  some 
service  rendered  in  a  recent  campaign,  but  who  were 
not  capable  of  administering  any  office  requiring  high 
business  qualifications,  or  who  had  worn  out  their 
influence  at  home  so  that  they  could  no  longer  be 
of  much  usefulness  to  their  party  there.  In  com 
mand  of  their  reservations,  such  men  usually  gave 
their  chief  thought  to  getting  through  their  prescribed 
course  of  duty  with  as  little  effort  or  worry  as  pos- 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       51 

sible.  Included  with  their  other  unsuitable  traits 
might  be  an  element  of  cowardice;  and,  in  order  to 
put  on  a  mask  of  bravado  which  they  believed  would 
awe  the  Indians  into  harmlessness,  they  were  some 
times  very  cruel.  They  could  be  so  with  compara 
tively  little  fear  of  exposure,  for  in  early  days  the 
Indians  could  not  communicate  with  Washington  ex 
cept  through  their  Agents,  and  then  only  as  tribes 
and  not  as  individuals;  and  if  a  complaint  ever  got 
past  an  Agent,  his  word  in  denial  carried  a  great  deal 
more  weight  than  theirs.  Whatever  may  or  may  not 
have  been  the  prevalence  of  abuses,  the  system  was 
distinctly  unwholesome;  and  the  growing  disgust  of 
the  public  with  such  of  its  unpleasant  fruits  as  cropped 
above  the  surface  led  to  the  changes  already  de 
scribed. 

Meanwhile,  a  process  of  evolution  had  been  going 
on  in  land  matters.  The  abnormalities  of  the  reser 
vation  policy  so  impressed  the  late  Henry  L.  Dawes, 
then  a  Senator  from  Massachusetts  and  a  generous 
student  of  the  Indian  question,  that  he  procured  the 
passage  of  the  general  allotment  act  of  1887.  The 
plan  which  he  proposed  to  inaugurate  on  a  broad  scale 
had  already  been  tried  on  a  narrow  one  by  special 
laws  affecting  a  few  single  tribes.  The  Dawes  law 
empowered  the  President,  whenever  in  his  judgment 
any  tribe  had  reached  a  stage  of  development  which 
would  warrant  such  a  change,  to  carve  up  its  reserva 
tion,  and  allot  to  every  man,  woman,  and  child  thereon 
a  separate  and  individual  farm  of  forty,  eighty,  or  one 
hundred  and  sixty  acres — the  area  being  decided  ac 
cording  to  sundry  variable  conditions  needless  to  enu- 


52  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

merate  here — and  to  issue  to  the  allottee  a  patent  for 
this  farm,  by  the  terms  of  which  the  government  was 
to  hold  it  in  trust  for  him  for  twenty-five  years  and 
then  present  him  with  a  title  in  fee.  In  the  inter 
val,  by  virtue  of  his  receiving  the  trust  patent, 
he  became  invested  with  all  the  privileges  of  a  citizen, 
except  the  right  to  sell  or  encumber  his  land,  which 
the  trust  also  exempted  from  taxation.  The  theory 
was  that  the  Indian  would  thus  be  assured  of  a  home 
and  the  means  of  self-support;  that  he  would  come 
to  be  regarded,  and  to  regard  himself,  as  a  distinct 
person,  instead  of  a  mere  infinitesimal  and  undivided 
part  of  a  tribal  whole;  that  his  vote  would  command 
attention  to  his  wants  from  politicians  who  had  long 
been  accustomed  to  ride  over  him  unscrupulously;  and 
that  the  twenty-five  years'  life  of  the  trust  would  be 
utilized  practically  as  a  period  of  education  and  pro 
bation,  during  which  he  would  fit  himself  for  the  re 
sponsibilities  of  land-ownership  and  independence. 

Some  of  these  expectations  were  realized,  but  with 
incidentals  which  no  one  could  have  foreseen.  It 
was  true  that  Indians  who  could  vote  soon  enjoyed 
a  degree  of  attention  from  the  politicians  quite  un 
known  to  Indians  who  could  not  vote;  but  this  meant 
also  that  they  furnished  fresh  victims  for  the  corrup- 
tionist,  who  was  not  long  in  learning  how  to  buy  and 
sell  their  votes,  at  wholesale  or  retail,  as  freely  as 
the  votes  of  a  corresponding  class  of  ignorant  citizens 
of  any  other  race.  Farming  had  become,  on  the  dry 
plains  of  the  West,  so  elaborate  an  art  as  to  tax  the 
ingenuity  even  of  white  men  of  pretty  well-trained 
intelligence,  and  descended  from  ancestors  who  had 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       53 

always  had  problems  to  master  in  competition  with 
others  in  their  own  lines  of  fortune-seeking;  so  it 
was  not  wonderful  that,  with  nothing  in  their  own 
experience  to  prepare  them  and  no  inherited  equip 
ment  for  tackling  such  difficulties,  and  with  markets 
for  their  surplus  products  too  remote  to  be  of  any 
real  avail,  many  of  the  Indians  found  agriculture  a 
precarious  means  of  livelihood  and  gradually  gave  it 
up  in  discouragement.* 

The  land  left  after  all  the  Indians  on  a  reservation 
had  been  allotted  was  usually  sold  to  settlers,  who, 
bringing  with  them  their  own  ways  of  working  and 
living,  not  only  developed  the  neighborhood  but  set 
an  example  to  those  Indians  who  still  desired  to  be 
come  farmers.  Other  whites,  who  did  not  care  to 
buy,  rented  farms  from  allottees  for  an  annual  stipend. 
The  government  consented  to  this  in  the  cases  of  un 
married  women,  widows,  children,  defectives,  and  any 
who  were  too  old  to  work,  but  frowned  upon  leasing 
by  able-bodied  men,  many  of  whom  nevertheless  con 
trived  to  outwit  their  custodians,  lease  their  lands,  and 
live  in  idleness  on  the  rents. 

*  Conditions  are  reported  to  have  been  somewhat  relieved  of 
late  by  a  system  of  reimbursable  appropriations,  which  began 
five  or  six  years  ago  with  an  experiment  at  the  Fort  Belknap 
Agency  in  Montana,  and  has  since  spread  to  a  few  other  reser 
vations.  It  contemplates  the  appropriation  by  Congress  of  a 
certain  sum  to  be  spent  on  implements,  seed,  and  other  farming 
necessaries  which  the  Indians  concerned  have  not  the  capital  to 
procure;  these  are  distributed  on  the  understanding  that  they 
are  to  be  paid  for  from  the  proceeds  of  the  farms  on  which  they 
are  used.  The  plan  has  not  been  in  operation  long  enough  to 
justify  a  sweeping  verdict  on  its  efficacy,  but  hopeful  reports 
come  from  some  of  the  Superintendents  who  have  had  the  dis 
bursing  of  funds  to  their  own  Indians. 


54  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

Lack  of  employment  meant,  for  these  men,  falling 
into  bad  ways.  Gambling,  always  a  favorite  vice 
among  primitive  peoples,  afforded  excitement  in  an 
atmosphere  generally  lifeless  and  uninteresting;  and 
there  were  always  near  a  reservation  plenty  of  rascals 
who  stood  ready  to  smuggle  whiskey  into  the  camps. 
Intoxication  became  a  curse  far  more  to  be  dreaded 
than  gambling,  for  the  Indian  gamesters  had  little 
wealth  to  throw  away ;  but  their  fiery  drink  drove  them 
to  deeds  of  violence  and  left  a  trail  of  disease  and 
decadence  wherever  it  was  carried.  Federal  stat 
utes,  as  well  as  local  laws  in  most  of  the  Western 
states,  imposed  serious  penalties  upon  selling  or  giv 
ing  liquor  to  Indians,  and,  as  long  as  the  red  men 
remained  absolutely  dependent  on  the  government, 
convictions  could  be  got  wherever  the  proofs  were 
clear  and  judges  and  juries  unbiased :  but  the  citizen 
ship  conferred  upon  an  allottee  with  his  trust  patent 
put  quite  another  face  on  this  matter.  The  point  was 
promptly  raised  that  the  sale  of  liquor  to  a  citizen 
within  a  state  could  not  be  punished  by  federal  law. 
One  dramseller  who  had  been  arrested  and  brought 
to  trial  under  a  federal  statute  for  selling  liquor 
to  an  Indian  allottee  carried  his  case,  by  appeal  after 
appeal,  to  the  United  States  Supreme  Court,  which 
settled  the  question  forever  by  deciding  in  his  favor. 

The  gross  debauching  of  the  Indian  ballot,  coupled 
with  this  defeat  of  all  efforts  of  the  government  to 
protect  an  allottee  from  the  liquor-dealers,  attracted 
wide  notice,  and  caused  the  enactment  of  an  amend 
ment  to  the  Dawes  allotment  law,  designated  the 
Burke  act  in  honor  of  the  Representative  from  South 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       55 

Dakota  who  engineered  it  through  ^Congress.  The 
new  act  postponed  the  citizenship  of  the  Indian  till 
the  government  trust  could  be  removed  from  his  land 
and  he  should  receive  his  title  in  fee.  It  also  empow 
ered  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  whenever  satisfied 
of  the  competence  of  an  allottee  to  manage  his  own 
affairs,  to  suspend  the  trust  and  give  him  his  final 
patent,  thus  clothing  him  with  citizenship  without 
waiting  for  the  expiration  of  the  twenty- five  years' 
probation  period.  Under  this  provision  the  govern 
ment  has  been  working  since  1906.  The  Indians  en 
franchised  before  the  passage  of  the  Burke  amend 
ment  are,  of  course,  unaffected  by  it;  but,  as  far  as 
the  authorities  at  Washington  have  been  able  to  con 
trol  conditions,  all  who  have  been  enfranchised  since 
are  persons  of  enough  intelligence  to  have  only  them 
selves  to  blame  if  they  lose  their  property  or  become 
besotted. 

To  give  the  red  man  an  equal  chance  with  the 
white  in  his  struggle  for  existence,  the  government 
added  to  its  other  benefactions  an  educational  estab 
lishment.  On  the  theory  that  the  way  to  train  an 
Indian  was  to  take  him  during  his  childhood  away 
from  the  surroundings  amid  which  he  had  been  born, 
bring  him  up  as  a  white  child  is  brought  up,  and  trust 
to  his  settling  in  one  of  the  older  communities  to 
follow  a  civilized  calling,  a  number  of  large  boarding- 
schools  have  been  planted  at  points  more  or  less  dis 
tant  from  the  reservations,  and  parents  have  been  in 
duced  to  let  their  children  be  kept  there  for  a  term 
of  years.  Another  plan  has  been  to  gather  the  chil 
dren  of  a  reservation  into  a  boarding-school  situated 


56  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

within  it,  where  they  can  be  taught  the  habits  of 
whites  without  being  too  far  separated  from  their 
families  to  permit  of  an  occasional  reunion.  Besides 
these  institutions  day-schools  are  maintained  on  many 
reservations,  presided  over  by  a  single  teacher  with 
the  assistance  of  a  wife,  husband,  or  companion. 
From  these  day-schools,  it  was  at  the  outset  the  gov 
ernment's  intention  to  graduate  the  pupils  into  the 
reservation  boarding-schools,  and  thence  into  the  non- 
reservation  boarding-schools,  the  ranks  of  the  pro 
moted  thinning  gradually  on  the  way  up.  As  a  mat 
ter  of  fact,  this  is  not  the  way  the  system  has  worked 
out.  The  ambition  of  the  large  schools  to  keep  their 
rolls  full  has  too  often  led  them  into  taking  children 
indiscriminately,  without  reference  to  the  smaller 
schools,  so  that  there  has  been  no  really  consistent 
order  of  progression.  The  school  question  is  treated 
more  at  length  in  another  chapter. 

The  Indians  are  commonly  called  the  "  wards  of 
the  Nation."  This  phrase  had  its  origin  in  a  judi 
cial  decision  many  years  ago,  in  which  an  attempt  was 
made  to  define  the  duty  of  the  United  States  Govern 
ment  toward  the  native  race.  Although  the  theory 
of  wardship  may  be  made,  by  a  very  liberal  inter 
pretation  of  terms,  to  answer  for  general  purposes, 
it  does  not  meet  all  the  needs  of  the  situation.  When 
an  ordinary  guardian  takes  forcible  possession  of  the 
property  of  his  wards  at  a  price,  and  under  condi 
tions  of  payment  fixed  by  himself,  we  scrutinize  his 
conduct  as  open  to  the  suspicion  of  fraud,  and  he 
has  to  make  out  an  extremely  good  case  in  order  to 
clear  himself  of  this.  He  is  obliged,  also,  to  make  a 


MOQUI  GIRLS  (With  Headdress  Indicating  Marriageable  Age). 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       57 

report  from  .  time  to  time  to  the  court  which  gave 
him  his  authority,  and  in  a  dozen  other  ways  he  is 
made  to  feel  that  he  is  not  in  all  respects  his  own 
master. 

None  of  these  restrictions  finds  a  parallel  in  the 
position  of  the  government  when  handling  Indian 
affairs.  There  is  no  one  to  question  the  sovereignty 
of  the  government.  Moreover,  it  is  a  composite 
organism,  destitute  of  a  personality,  so  that  responsi 
bility  for  its  acts  is  diffused  and  uncertain.  The  Presi 
dent  can  do  nothing  without  the  direction  or  permis 
sion  of  Congress.  Both  Congress  and  the  President 
are  helpless  before  an  adverse  mandate  of  the  courts. 
But  as  the  courts  are  themselves  the  creatures  of  Con 
gress,  with  a  scope  of  action  distinctly  prescribed  by 
statute,  and  as  the  judges  who  compose  them  are  ap 
pointed  by  the  President  with  the  consent  of  the 
Senate,  there  is  absolutely  no  point  at  which  we  can 
focus  accountability  upon  any  one  of  the  three  coor 
dinate  branches.  They  are  all  parts  of  the  same  huge 
machine,  which  works  as  a  whole.  Hence,  if  Con 
gress  decides  that  a  certain  tract  of  land  occupied 
by  an  Indian  tribe  is  needed  to  accommodate  the 
influx  of  white  immigration  into  that  part  of  the 
country,  it  has  only  to  enact  a  law  directing  the  proper 
executive  officers  to  take  possession  of  it  and  dispose 
of  it  to  the  newcomers  on  such  and  such  terms. 

Actually,  its  uniform  course  is  to  fix  a  certain 
price  which  shall  be  paid  the  Indians  for  surrendering 
the  land:  this  is  a  concession  to  decency.  But  as  its 
power  to  fix  a  price  is  bounded  by  no  maximum  and 
minimum,  there  is  nothing  which  could  prevent  its 


58  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

simple  seizure  of  anything  it  chose,  without  compensa 
tion  beyond  furnishing  some  other  place  of  abode  for 
the  dispossessed  occupants.  Even  where  a  distinct 
contract  has  been  entered  into,  by  order  of  Congress, 
between  the  government  and  a  body  of  Indians,  for 
the  payment  of  so  much  money  in  consideration  of 
the  relinquishment  of  so  much  land,  there  is  no  way 
of  compelling  the  government  to  live  up  to  its  agree 
ment  against  its  will.  A  tribe  cannot  carry  such  a 
case  into  court  unless  Congress  gives  it  permission 
to  do  so;  and,  when  permission  has  been  granted 
and  the  tribe  has  carried  its  claim  all  the  way  from 
the  lowest  to  the  highest  court  and  received  a  final 
award  for  the  full  amount  it  demanded,  Congress  has 
still  to  appropriate  the  rnoney  to  satisfy  the  judg 
ment.  No  sheriff  can  seize  the  Capitol  or  the  White 
House  and  sell  it  under  the  hammer,  or  force  the 
gates  of  the  Treasury  vaults  and  help  himself  to 
enough  of  the  money  stored  there  to  pay  the  creditors 
their  due. 

In  short,  no  power  on  earth  can  compel  the  settle 
ment  of  a  debt,  or  the  performance  of  a  pledge,  from 
the  government  to  the  Indians,  except  a  sensitive  pub 
lic  conscience.  Does  not  this  make  the  pretence  of 
the  relation  of  guardian  and  ward  a  trifle  absurd?  A 
moral  obligation  exists,  it  is  true:  the  same  that  al 
ways  exists  between  the  strong  and  the  weak.  It  is 
the  obligation  which  makes  cities  establish  hospitals, 
and  states  support  asylums,  and  charity  boards  pro 
vide  food  and  clothes  and  shelter  for  orphan  chil 
dren.  It  is  the  same  force  which  has  built  up  the 
free  school  system  and  keeps  it  going  at  the  expense 


RED  MAN  AND  THE  GOVERNMENT       59 

of  the  whole  body  of  taxpayers,  and  it  is  inspired 
by  precisely  the  same  motive — an  enlightened  instinct 
of  self-protection.  In  the  case  of  the  hospitals  and 
asylums  and  schools,  however,  the  beneficiaries  are 
directly  under  the  eyes  of  the  benefactors;  and  to  take 
care  of  the  unfortunate,  the  unsound,  and  the  igno 
rant  is  recognized  as  the  only  way  the  rest  of  the 
community  can  avert  the  evils  which  would  flow  from 
the  increase  of  such  classes  in  the  midst  of  them. 
With  the  Indians  it  was  different  during  the  period 
when  the  existing  relation  grew  up,  the  bulk  of  the 
white  citizens  being  far  separated  from  the  bulk  of 
the  red  dependents.  As  long  as  that  separation  con 
tinued,  little  or  no  heed  was  paid  to  the  moral  im 
provement  of  the  Indians,  or  to  their  possible  destiny. 
The  uppermost  thought  in  the  minds  of  our  govern 
ment  and  people  was  to  avoid  bloodshed  between  the 
races,  or,  if  it  occurred,  to  turn  it  to  profitable  ac 
count  by  forcing  the  natives  farther  westward  and 
taking  away  more  of  their  land  in  reprisal. 

Here,  in  a  nutshell,  is  the  story  of  the  white  man's 
advance  and  the  red  man's  retreat.  That  story  epito 
mizes  the  philosophy  underlying  the  government's 
adoption  of  the  airs  of  a  guardian  over  the  Indians. 
As  their  guardian,  it  disciplined  them  when  they  disre 
garded  its  admonitions;  as  their  guardian,  it  took 
possession  of  large  slices  of  their  estate  wherever  it 
could  claim  that  they  were  using  their  land  unwisely 
and  therefore  would  be  better  without  it;  as  their 
guardian,  it  concluded  that  they  were  likely  to  grow 
faster  in  grace  if  their  wild-game  supply  were  cut 
off,  and  on  this  pretext  compelled  them  to  give  up 


60  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

hunting  and  submit  to  be  fed  and  clothed  like  paupers 
at  public  expense.  None  of  its  designs,  however 
veiled  with  benevolence,  was  carried  out  without  vig 
orous  resistance  on  the  part  of  the  wards,  and  the 
expenditure  of  many  lives  and  much  money;  and,  as  if 
to  salve  its  conscience  for  all  these  sacrifices,  the 
guardian  government  established  a  system  of  schools 
where  coming  generations  of  its  wards  could  be  taught 
to  cope  with  the  master  race  which  had  overcome  their 
fathers. 

Let  us  be  entirely  charitable,  and  throw  no  dispar 
agement  upon  any  good  thing  the  government  has 
essayed  to  do.  Considering  how  it  is  handicapped  at 
every  turn  by  its  own  cumbrousness,  perhaps  the  won 
der  is  that  it  has  done  as  well  as  it  has.  But,  in  all 
seriousness,  it  has  proved  the  mistake  of  attempting 
to  perform  a  purely  human  and  sympathetic  task  by 
machinery — even  the  machinery  of  a  great  and  good 
nation.  As  well  might  we  deliver  a  family  of  children 
into  the  keeping  of  a  mechanical  mother  or  an  auto 
matic  nurse! 


Ill 

THE   RED   MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE 
NEIGHBOR 


Better  is  a  neighbor  that  is  near  than  a  brother  far  off. — 
Proverbs  27:10. 

You  know  our  practice:  If  a  white  man,  in  traveling  through 
our  country,  enters  one  of  our  cabins,  we  warm  him  if  he  is 
cold,  we  give  him  meat  and  drink  that  he  may  allay  his  hunger 
and  thirst,  and  spread  soft  furs  for  him  to  rest  and  sleep  on. 
We  demand  nothing  in  return. 

But  if  I  go  into  a  white  man's  house  and  ask  for  victuals  and 
drink,  they  say,  "Where  is  your  money?"  And  if  I  have  none 
they  say,  "Get  out,  you  Indian  dog!"  You  see,  they  have  not 
yet  learned  the  little  good  things  our  mothers  taught  us  when 
we  were  children. — CHIEF  CANESTOGO,  of  the  Onondagas. 


Ill 


THE  RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE 
NEIGHBOR 

IN  view  of  the  traditional  objection  of  the  red 
aborigines  of  this  country  to  the  invasion  of 
white  men  and  to  white  manners  and  methods,  it 
is  of  interest  to  note  how  universally  white  is  re 
garded  among  the  Indians  as  the  color  of  majesty, 
supremacy,  deity.  The  President  of  the  United  States 
is  the  "  Great  White  Father,"  and  the  Commissioner 
of  Indian  Affairs  the  "  Little  White  Father."  The 
sun-worshippers  in  the  Southwest,  who  are  always  on 
the  watch  for  the  second  coming  of  Montezuma, 
speak  of  him  as  their  "  Great  White  Brother  Who 
Lives  in  the  East."  Elsewhere  one  hears  often  a  ref 
erence  to  a  "  Great  White  Spirit."  The  clouds  which 
conceal  a  benevolent  deity  are  white ;  the  Messiah,  over 
whose  promised  advent  the  northern  plains  Indians 
went  mad  about  twenty  years  ago,  was  white ;  and  In 
dians  who  have  been  converted  to  Christianity  have 
told  me  that  they  were  now  "  praying  to  the  White 
God,"  as  distinguished  from  the  god  or  gods  they 
formerly  worshipped. 

The  superior  powers  they  recognize  in  the  white 
people  seem  to  most  Indians  neither  the  cause  nor 
the  effect  of  the  whiteness,  but  merely  its  concomitant : 

63 


64*  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

the  Great  Spirit,  they  say,  looked  with  special  favor 
upon  one  branch  of  the  human  race,  and  endowed  it 
simultaneously  with  a  white  skin  and  with  the  art 
of  "  making  big  medicine  " — that  is,  of  doing  won 
derful  things.  Here  we  have,  reduced  to  its  simplest 
terms,  the  Indian  mode  of  accounting  for  gunpowder 
and  repeating  rifles,  steam  machinery,  electrical  de 
vices,  great  structures  of  masonry  and  metals,  and, 
in  general,  the  harnessing  of  nature's  forces  to  obey 
the  will  of  men;  it  is  all  "  big  medicine  " — something 
to  inspire  awe,  but  not  to  provoke  a  hopeless  attempt 
at  emulation.  Hence,  the  Indian,  instead  of  trying, 
like  the  negro,  to  copy  his  white  neighbors,  has  usu 
ally  stood  aloof,  maintaining  a  position  in  which  a 
Jdignified  recognition  of  the  superior  inventive  genius 
of  the  white  race  is  mixed  with  an  assertion  of  his 
own  equality  in  every  other  respect,  and  his  entire  con 
tent  to  remain  as  his  Creator  made  him. 

Although  in  an  earlier  chapter,  while  trying  to 
sketch  in  outline  a  picture  of  Indian  life  as  it  was 
before  the  whites  poured  into  this  country,  I  pre 
sented  the  tepee  as  the  characteristic  dwelling,  it  was 
only  because  this  was  the  most  common  kind.  There 
were  several  others.  The  Mandans  of  the  Missouri 
Valley  fixed  heavy  posts  in  position,  laid  cross  tim 
bers  on  these,  and  covered  the  whole  with  sod.  The 
Comanches  made  their  houses,  as  far  as  the  frame 
work  was  concerned,  after  the  fashion  of  the  tepee, 
but  used  as  covering  a  heavy  thatch  of  weeds  and 
grass,  so  that  one  of  their  villages  looked  at  a  dis 
tance  like  a  hayfield  dotted  with  stacks.  The  Ojib- 
ways  made  theirs  of  poles  and  bark,  in  oblong  shape, 


INDIAN  HOMES    (Best  of  the  New  Type). 


OJIBWAY  TEPEES    (Typical  of  the  Passing  Old  Life). 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    65 

with  upright  ends  and  a  door  in  each  end.  The  Iro- 
quois  followed  generally  the  same  style,  but  ran  a 
long  passage  lengthwise  of  the  hut  with  compartments 
opening  out  of  it  and  places  for  fire  at  intervals. 
The  Pueblo  Indians  used  stone  for  their  sidewalls, 
and  boughs  and  saplings,  plastered  with  a  cement-like 
mud,  for  their  roofs,  and  built  their  houses  one  against 
or  above  another  in  great  clusters,  thus  effecting  some 
of  the  same  sort  of  economies  in  construction  that  we 
do  when  we  build  city  dwellings  in  solid  blocks,  or 
apartment-houses  grouping  many  suites  together. 

In  every  instance,  it  will  be  observed,  material  and 
design  were  dictated  by  environment  and  occupation. 
Where,  for  example,  large  game  was  most  abundant, 
skins  were  employed  for  covering;  and  for  conven 
ience  in  hanging  these,  a  conical  structure  of  poles 
seemed  fittest.  Where  there  were  forests,  timber  and 
bark  entered  more  into  the  making  of  a  dwelling. 
Where  the  prairie  grass  grew  rank,  the  thatch  came 
naturally  into  use;  while  on  the  broad  stretches  of 
desert  clay,  broken  occasionally  by  buttes  of  stratified 
rock,  the  stone  house  was  almost  a  necessity.  Again, 
it  should  be  noted  that  the  tepee,  the  form  of  dwelling 
most  readily  movable,  was  used  chiefly  by  the  Indians 
who  subsisted  on  several  varieties  of  game,  which  had 
each  to  be  sought  on  a  different  feeding-ground  and 
at  a  different  season  of  the  year;  for  the  house  which 
could  be  picked  up  when  the  season  changed,  or  when 
a  new  hunting  region  had  to  be  visited,  and  shifted  to 
a  more  convenient  place,  came  nearest  to  an  ideal 
abode.  Whereas,  among  tribes  whose  pastoral  or 
agricultural  pursuits  kept  them  almost  all  the  time  in 


66  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

one  neighborhood,  a  more  permanent  dwelling  was 
considered  desirable. 

For  clothing,  woven  fabrics  appear  to  have  been 
not  wholly  unknown  among  some  of  the  more  ad 
vanced  tribes,  though  the  workmanship  was  crude  in 
the  extreme  and  much  of  the  material  was  of  sorts 
which  have  long  since  passed  out  of  use,  such  as  thin 
strips  of  hide,  or  strings  made  of  twisted  turkey 
feathers.  The  primitive  Indian  ate  both  animal  and 
vegetable  foods,  but  the  animals  were  only  such  wild 
game  as  he  could  kill  with  the  clumsy  implements  at 
his  command,  and  the  vegetable  substances  were  the 
native  products  of  forest  and  plain,  like  roots,  ber- 
ries,  nuts,  fungi,  and  seeds  of  various  kinds.  If  any 
sporadic  attempt  was  made  to  domesticate  and  breed 
animals  for  food  purposes  it  seems  to  have  been  con 
fined  mainly  to  turkeys  and  dogs;  and  when,  among 
tribes  whose  habits  were  sufficiently  rixed  to  permit 
of  it,  the  women  took  a  little  trouble  to  raise  corn, 
beans,  potatoes,  and  melons,  their  knowledge  of  how 
to  care  for  them  was  only  what  their  mothers  had 
picked  up  from  experiments  and  accident.  Whenever 
it  was  practicable,  food-stuffs  were  cooked  in  prefer 
ence  to  eating  them  raw;  but  the  cooking  was  elemen 
tary,  often  amounting  to  no  more  than  parching  or 
steaming.  Where  fuel  was  scarce,  resort  was  had 
sometimes  to  hanging  meats  in  the  sun  till  they  had 
either  dried  hard  or  become  tender  by  semi-putrefac 
tion.  All  better  methods  came  in  with  the  whites. 

Notwithstanding  the  prodigality  of  nature  and  his 
independence  of  the  cares  which  beset  the  modern 
man,  the  old  Indian  was  not  wasteful  of  his  resources. 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    67 

He  picked  no  more  berries  than  he  needed  to  stay 
the  cravings  of  his  hunger,  and  scrupulously  avoided 
injuring  trees  and  bushes  which  bore  anything  edible. 
He  killed  no  more  game  than  he  needed  for  himself 
and  his  camp,  and  ate  every  part  of  what  he  did  kill. 
When  he  built  a  fire,  he  used  only  the  fuel  that  was 
necessary,  and  before  quitting  the  spot  extinguished 
the  flame  with  care. 

Along  came  the  white  man,  the  finished  product  of 
centuries  of  civilization,  and  reversed  nearly  every 
thing  the  Indian  was  doing.  Is  it  strange  that  the 
Indian  found  him  self-contradictory  and  incomprehen 
sible?  He  professed  to  be  the  follower  of  a  Prince 
of  Peace,  yet  his  distinguishing  insignia  were  weapons 
for  destroying  life,  and  his  manners  were  domineer 
ing  and  bristling  with  threats.  He  worshipped  a  Deity 
whom  he  professed  to  trust  as  an  ever-provident  Fa 
ther,  yet  he  was  always  taking  thought  for  possible 
sufferings  on  the  morrow,  and  stood  ready  to  risk 
his  life  in  storing  up  wealth  which  he  could  not  use 
himself.  He  glorified  ease,  yet  worked  incessantly. 
He  built  a  house  with  great  labor,  and  divided  it 
into  rooms  which  would  require  hirri  to  move  about, 
though  pretending  to  associate  rest  and  quiet  with  a 
home.  Instead  of  mastering  the  several  arts  required 
to  minister  to  his  own  wants,  he  delved  incessantly 
at  one  employment  to  the  disregard  of  others.  He 
was  a  farmer  or  a  blacksmith,  a  miner  or  a  tailor,  a 
soldier  or  a  priest :  and  the  soldier  could  not  farm  nor 
the  priest  weld  metals.  He  was  always  decrying 
waste,  yet  threw  away  enough  to  subsist  a  fellow-man. 
If  he  hunted,  his  trail  was  strewn  with  untasted  meats. 


6S  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

If  he  built  a  fire  for  a  night's  camp,  it  must  be  big 
enough  to  illuminate  a  whole  canyon. 

It  has  puzzled  many  observers  of  the  Indian  to 
make  out  where  he  draws  the  line  of  differentiation 
between  the  ideas  of  the  white  man  which  he  adopts 
and  those  which  he  discards.  It  never  seemed  to  me 
particularly  mysterious :  he  simply  accepts  the  things 
which  penetrate  his  understanding  and  appeal  to  his 
common  sense,  and  rejects  the  others.  He  makes  his 
garments  now  of  cloth,  and  exchanges  his  rawhide 
tepee  for  one  of  canvas  or  cotton  sheeting,  because 
game  has  become  so  scarce  that  he  can  no  longer  pro 
cure  skins  as  of  old.  He  eats  flour,  because  it  saves 
the  women  of  his  household  the  drudgery  of  grind 
ing  the  grain  between  flat  stones.  If  he  wears  a  hat, 
it  is  not  for  the  purpose  of  keeping  his  head  warm, 
but  because  its  broad  brim  will  protect  his  eyes  from 
the  direct  rays  of  the  sun.  He  prefers  a  gun  to  his 
old  bow  and  arrow,  because  it  will  bring  down  his 
game  at  longer  range.  He  puts  a  bit  into  his  pony's 
mouth  and  a  saddle  upon  its  back,  or  hitches  a  wagon 
behind  it,  because  these  accoutrements  will  help  him 
to  travel  more  easily. 

But  he  does  not  take  so  kindly  to  the  stiff  leather 
shoes  of  the  white  man,  accepting  them  only  under 
protest,  when  it  is  inconvenient  to  get  his  yielding 
moccasins.  A  coat,  with  its  refractory  sleeves,  he 
will  not  wear  unless  compelled  to,  though  the  white 
man's  waistcoat,  with  its  open  armholes,  resembles 
his  ancestral  hunting-shirt  enough  to  win  him  to  its 
use  pretty  promptly,  while  for  an  outside  covering 
his  blanket  supplies  all  needs.  If  he  is  obliged  to 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    69 

own  a  house,  he  would  rather  turn  it  over  to  his 
horses  or  utilize  its  waste  space  for  storage  purposes, 
and  erect  a  canvas  tepee  or  a  brush  wickiup  in  the 
yard  for  his  own  occupancy.  He  adopts  the  ready- 
made  aniline  dyes,  because  they  give  him  the  vivid 
reds,  blues,  and  greens  of  which  he  is  so  fond,  with 
out  the  trouble  of  decocting  the  vegetable  stains.  He 
adorns  his  raiment  with  German  beads,  since  porcu 
pine-quills  have  become  less  abundant  and  the  art  of 
coloring  them  has  so  largely  died  out  among  his  peo 
ple.  He  even  looks  with  favor  on  a  parlor  organ, 
because,  though  nobody  in  his  family  can  play  it, 
the  children  can  amuse  themselves  by  pressing  bel 
lows  and  keys  and  hearing  the  instrument  wail  as 
if  it  were  a  living  thing;  but  the  chances  are  that 
he  will  keep  it  outside  of  his  house,  where  the  rains 
and  sand-storms  work  their  will  with  it  unhindered. 
And  if  his  wife  buys  a  sewing-machine  because  it  will 
enable  her  to  wear  three  times  as  many  dresses  as  she 
can  when  she  has  to  make  them  toilsomely  with  the 
common  needle,  neither  she  nor  he  will  probably  spend 
five  minutes'  thought  on  oiling  its  joints  or  replacing 
any  part  which  has  become  useless  through  unskilful 
handling. 

The  casual  traveler  to-day  through  that  part  of  the 
West  which  we  long  styled  the  frontier,  will  look 
in  vain  for  the  noble  red  men  so  romantically  por 
trayed  in  Catlin's  paintings  and  the  moving-picture 
films.  It  is  only  by  leaving  the  beaten  paths  of  travel 
and  wandering  far  afield  that  one  comes  into  contact 
with  interesting  remnants  of  the  ancient  race,  amid 
characteristic  surroundings.  Not  many  of  the  old- 


70  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

style  Indians  are  left,  even  there.  As  a  rule,  the 
women  are  far  more  conservative  than  the  men,  but 
both  sexes  have  felt  the  effect  of  brushing  elbows  with 
Caucasian  civilization,  however  slightly. 

Most  of  the  men  continue  to  wear  their  hair  long, 
and  woven  into  two  braids,  which  hang  over  their 
shoulders  in  front;  not  a  few  paint  their  faces  in  part; 
and  their  gaudy  neckerchiefs,  bead  chains,  big  silver 
rings  and  bracelets,  and  gold  ear-pendants  recall  the 
stage  in  the  evolution  of  this  people  when,  as  in  the 
bird  world,  the  forth-faring  male  monopolized  the 
bodily  decorations,  and  left  all  soberer  habiliments  to 
the  female  home-keeper,  whose  function  it  was  to 
watch  over  their  growing  family  and  keep  everything 
in  order  for  his  return.  The  women,  save  for  the 
better  materials  of  which  their  clothes  are  made,  pre 
sent  much  the  same  outward  appearance  now  that 
they  did  in  the  days  of  the  gold  fever  and  the  pony 
express.  But  neither  men  nor  women  lead  the  same 
lives  or  wear  the  same  air  that  they  did  even  as  lately 
as  then.  The  men  have  largely  lost  their  spirit,  the 
women  their  gayety.  The  advance  of  the  new  social 
order  into  their  country  may  have  made  existence 
easier  in  some  respects,  but  with  it  have  come  a  dis 
tinct  loss  of  self-dependence  and  certain  forebodings 
which  have  fallen  like  a  chill  upon  hearts  once  care 
free. 

These  latter-day  Indians  are,  for  the  most  part, 
dirty  in  their  persons,  habits,  and  homes.  This  was 
to  be  expected,  doubtless,  in  view  of  the  particulars 
in  which  their  mode  of  life  has  been  changed.  The 
rude  cleansing  which  used  to  be  done  by  the  winds 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    71 

sweeping  through  their  camps,  and  by  the  natural 
evaporation  of  the  moisture  on  skin  exposed  to  th£ 
sun,  no  longer  comes  to  pass  now  that  they  wear  cloth 
ing  which  smothers  the  body,  and  sleep  and  eat  in  sub 
stantial  houses.  The  Indian  who  has  once  been  led 
to  array  himself  in  "  citizen's  dress,"  and  huddle  his 
family  together  in  a  building  with  solid  sides,  an  im 
movable  roof,  and  windows  that  can  be  closed  with 
out  excluding  the  light,  speedily  yields  to  the  enervat 
ing  influence  of  such  luxuries.  He  is  apt  to  cover 
himself  with  the  same  weight  of  clothing  in  winter 
and  summer,  and  wear  these  garments  night  and  day. 
When  the  season  of  cold  winds  and  snows  begins,  he 
proceeds  to  build  the  biggest  fire  his  stove  will  hold, 
seal  windows  and  doors  hermetically,  and  pass  his 
nights  in  the  close  atmosphere  thus  created,  regardless 
of  the  fact  that  some  members  of  his  household  may 
be  suffering  from  diseases  which  thrive  and  spread 
in  confinement. 

He  looks  about  him  and  sees  children  dying  on 
every  side.  His  older  neighbors  who  used  to  be  stal 
wart  hunters  or  warriors  have  fallen  into  a  state  of 
lethargic  indifference.  He  bewails  the  degeneracy  of 
the  young  men  who  are  coming  to  the  front  of  af 
fairs,  making  no  claims  to  the  prowess  which  was  the 
chief  pride  of  an  earlier  generation,  but  content  if 
they  can  procure  tobacco  enough  to  keep  a  cigarette 
always  alight,  and  coin  enough  in  their  pockets  to  give 
zest  to  a  game  of  chance.  Ask  your  old  red  man  what 
all  this  means  and  he  will  tell  you  that  it  is  the  effect 
of  the  white  man's  intrusion  into  his  country.  It  is 
the  white  man's  wealth,  the  white  man's  power,  the 


72  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

white  man's  cunning,  and  the  white  man's  restless 
energy  which  have  made  the  Indian — conscious  of  his 
inability  to  cope  with  the  new  conditions  grafted  upon 
his  own  simple  environment  in  spite  of  his  resistance — 
so  hopeless  and  sodden. 

Now  leave  the  old  man's  camp  and  enter  one  of  the 
pioneer  white  settlements,  and  you  are  impressed  ere 
long  by  the  discovery  that  there  is  another  side  to 
this  picture.  Here  you  find  a  few  Indians  living  among 
the  whites  on  terms  of  equality,  class  with  class;  for 
there  is '  no  such  caste  line,  drawn  on  color,  between 
the  Tvhite  and  red  races  in  the  West  as  there  is  be 
tween  the  white  and  black  races  in  the  South.  You 
will  find  neat  Indian  women  holding  their  places  as 
mistresses  of  white  men's  homes.  You  will  be  waited 
on,  across  the  counter  of  the  general  store,  by  an  In 
dian  clerk.  At  the  railway  station  you  will  find  young 
Indian  men  trundling  freight  about  the  platform,  and 
in  the  rural  highways  you  will  meet  Indian  teamsters 
hauling  produce  on  the  first  stage  of  its  journey  from 
farm  to  market.  You  will  see  Indian  harvesters  in 
the  grain  fields,  and  Indian  laborers  digging  a  public 
irrigation  canal.  An  Indian  hostler  will  look  after 
your  horse  at  the  livery  stable. 

When  you  have  saturated  yourself  with  these  ob 
servations,  have  a  chat  with  one  of  the  hangers-on  at 
your  hotel :  he  will  assure  you  that  the  Indian, 
wherever  you  find  him,  is  lazy,  morose,  dishonest,  a 
cumberer  of  the  ground  whose  extermination  would 
be  a  blessing  to  the  community.  Then  talk  to  the 
best  people  you  meet  in  the  town,  and  they  will  tell 
you  with  equal  positiveness  that,  though  the  Indian 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR   73 

has  faults  and  many  of  them,  he  is  a  good  fellow 
at  bottom,  and  everybody  sympathizes  with  him  as 
the  under-dog  in  a  long,  hard,  and  bitter  race  conflict. 
And,  to  cap  the  climax  of  this  bewildering  farrago  of 
phenomena  and  opinions,  you  learn  from  all  sides  that 
the  educated  Indian  is  the  poorest  specimen  of  his  peo 
ple,  and  the  ignorant,  non-progressive  Indian  the 
worthiest. 

How  shall  we  reconcile  so  many^  inconsistencies? 
By  remembering,  first,  that  it  has  been  the  fate  of 
the  red  man,  ever  since  he  began  to  have  white  neigh 
bors,  to  be  judged,  for  public  purposes,  by  persons 
whose  range  of  vision  is  limited  by  their  individual 
experience.  Merchants  who  have  sold  goods  to  In 
dians  on  credit  for  many  years,  will  bear  as  prompt 
witness  to  their  honesty  as  swindlers  who  have  tried 
to  cheat  them  will  bear  to  their  trickiness.  Soldiers 
who  have  had  to  do  with  them  in  frontier  wars  have 
told  us  that  they  are  trusty  allies  and  brave  foes, 
while  more  than  one  historian  of  repute  has  accused 
them  of  an  habitual  treachery  incompatible  with  any 
of  the  sterner  human  virtues.  An  employer  who  has 
used  Indian  labor  for  years  testifies  that  when  he  sets 
a  gang  of  red  men  at  a  job,  he  can  go  away  and  leave 
them  without  fear  that  they  will  stop  work  or  shirk 
it  as  soon  as  he  is  out  of  sight;  whereas  one  who  has 
no  idea  of  how  to  handle  them  is  quite  as  positive  that 
they  cannot  be  depended  on  from  hour  to  hour.  The 
impatient  white  denounces  the  Indian  as  sullen,  though 
one  who  meets  him  on  a  sympathetic  footing  finds  him 
full  of  humor.  White  men  who  have  made  the  ac 
quaintance  of  the  Indian  only  after  he  has  been  de- 


74  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

bauched  by  those  who  would  rob  him,  regard  him  as 
a  weak  creature,  who  is  naturally  easy  to  victimize 
and  therefore  has  never  had  half  a  chance;  while  those 
who  have  crossed  weapons  with  him  in  a  contest  of 
shrewdness  declare  that  he  wears  his  appearance  of 
unsophistication  only  as  a  mask.  Rarely  indeed  has 
any  white  sociologist  attempted  to  study  the  red  race 
as  a  whole,  on  philosophic  lines.  Every  one  who 
does,  reaches  the  conclusion  that  it  is  inherently 
little  better  or  worse  than  any  other  race,  and  that 
many  of  the  traits  which  are  popularly  regarded  as 
typically  Indian  are  in  fact  not  natural  racial  pecu 
liarities,  but  characteristic  of  primitive  peoples  in  gen 
eral,  or  the  product  of  some  special  course  of  self- 
imposed  discipline. 

Still,  all  this  fails  to  explain  the  almost  universal 
disparagement,  by  the  Western  settler,  of  the  educated 
by  comparison  with  the  uneducated  Indian.  At  the 
outset,  it  is  a  question  of  terms.  What  his  critics 
usually  mean  by  an  educated  Indian  is  not  one  who 
has  had  his  schooling  at  home,  or  one  who  has  re 
ceived  a  degree  from  a  college  of  standing,  but  one 
who  has  been  sent  away  to  a  big  boarding-school  a 
long  distance  from  his  reservation,  and  put  through 
a  five,  six,  or  seven  years'  course  of  study.  If  he  re 
turns  with  an  engraved  certificate  of  proficiency,  a 
starched  collar,  and  patent-leather  shoes,  resolved  to 
impress  the  world  with  his  importance  and  use  it  as 
a  lever  for  his  own  advantage  rather  than  that  of  his 
people,  he  is  at  once  accepted  by  the  unthinking  as 
an  illustration  of  all  that  the  white  man's  education 
does  for  an  Indian.  What  happens? 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR   75 

He  has  so  far  forgotten  his  native  tongue  that  he 
cannot  converse  in  it  with  his  family  or  former  play 
mates.  His  parents  look  askance  at  his  strange  ways; 
to  his  brothers  he  is  to  all  intents  a  foreigner.  Where 
he  had  dreamed  of  an  admiring  welcome,  he  is  met 
with  only  an  incredulous  or  uncomprehending  aloof 
ness.  He  is  loftily  censorious  of  local  conditions  with 
which  his  long  absence  has  put  him  out  of  touch,  and 
the  only  person  he  can  make  a  target  for  his  com 
plaints  is  the  Superintendent  of  his  reservation,  with 
whom  he  is  soon  embroiled,  and  against  whom  he 
pours  a  flood  of  charges  into  Washington.  The  result 
of  such  a  clash  is  almost  surely  defeat  for  the  ac 
cuser,  as  the  Agent  has  the  ear  of  the  government, 
while  the  returned  student's  standing  is  still  dubious. 
Then  he  denounces  everybody  and  everything  con 
nected  with  the  Indian  Service  as  corrupt,  and  lapses 
into  petty  mischief-making  or  utter  idleness.  Mean 
while,  however,  his  too  ready  acceptance  as  a  type 
has  thrown  into  obscurity  his  worthier  classmate, 
whose  desire  is  to  get  once  more  into  sympathetic  rela 
tions  with  his  people,  and  to  help  them  by  his  unos 
tentatious  but  wholesome  example;  who,  if  he  cannot 
make  a  living  at  one  calling,  is  ready  to  take  up  an 
other,  however  humble;  till  presently  he  settles  into 
his  place  as  a  member  of  the  quiet,  law-abiding  ele 
ment,  of  whom  nobody  inquires  whether  his  intelli 
gence  was  trained  at  home  or  abroad. 

The  question  of  how  the  red  man  ought  to  be  edu 
cated  has  given  rise  to  some  of  the  warmest  contro 
versies  ever  waged  over  his  treatment  at  the  hands 
of  our  race.  In  the  Colonial  era,  the  chief  concern  of 


76  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

the  civilized  whites  was  for  the  Indians'  conversion 
to  Christianity,  as  is  shown  by  endowments  given 
to  certain  important  seats  of  learning.  Harvard  Uni 
versity  was  chartered  in  1650  for  the  "  education  of 
the  English  and  Indian  youth  of  this  country  in  knowl 
edge  and  godlynes,"  and  its  first  brick  dwelling  was 
erected  about  1660  for  an  Indian  college.  A  genera 
tion  later,  William  and  Mary  College  set  up  an  Indian 
department;  and  Dartmouth  College  was  started  as 
an  institution  for  preparing  Indian  youth  for  mission 
ary  work  among  their  own  people.  What  is  now 
Princeton  University  was  long  identified  with  a  simi 
lar  project.  So  little  interest,  however,  was  mani 
fested  by  the  Indians  in  these  efforts  in  their  behalf 
that  one  enterprise  after  another  was  abandoned,  and 
finally  the  whole  responsibility  for  the  instruction  of 
the  Indians  was  transferred  to  the  churches  which 
maintained  missions  among  them.  Not  till  1819  did 
the  nation  at  large  take  any  pronounced  step  toward 
the  support  of  Indian  schools. 

From  the  small  beginnings  of  that  day,  the  Indian 
educational  system  has  grown  to  such  proportions 
that  we  now  spend  on  it  four  million  dollars  a  year 
and  more.  It  embraces,  in  round  numbers,  twenty 
non-reservation  boarding-schools,  with  an  attendance 
of  7,600  pupils;  seventy  reservation  boarding-schools, 
with  10,000  pupils;  and  one  hundred  and  fifty  day- 
schools,  with  an  enrollment  of  6,500.  Besides  these, 
all  of  which  are  secular,  several  of  the  religious  de 
nominations  support  schools  on  the  reservations, 
where  tenets  of  the  Christian  faith  are  taught  in  con 
junction  with  the  ordinary  branches  of  learning,  and 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    77 

the  five  tribes  originally  settled  in  Oklahoma  have 
schools  of  their  own.  The  larger  government  non- 
reservation  schools  carry  their  pupils  through  what 
we  know  as  the  eighth  grade,  and  in  a  few  cases  do 
some  high-school  work  and  a  little  commercial  train 
ing;  and  they  are  equipped  with  agricultural  lands 
and  dairies,  and  with  shops  in  which  rudimentary  in 
dustrial  instruction  is  given.  The  reservation  board 
ing-schools  are,  in  a  way,  reduced  copies  of  the 
non-reservation  schools,  the  scope  of  their  technical  in 
struction  being  much  narrower,  the  scholastic  course 
shorter,  and  the  ages  of  the  pupils  generally  some 
what  younger. 

Observe  that  both  these  classes  of  schools  offer  the 
Indian  not  only  free  tuition,  but  also  free  lodging, 
free  food,  free  clothing,  and  free  medical  attendance, 
thus  going  several  degrees  farther  than  the  most  lib 
eral  provision  anywhere  made  for  the  youth  of  other 
races  at  public  expense,  except  in  institutions  for 
paupers,  criminals,  and  defectives.  Even  the  transpor 
tation  of  the  pupils  to  and  fro  is  paid  for  by  the  gov 
ernment.  We  find  but  one  opinion  now  as  to  cut 
ting  off  the  free  rations  formerly  doled  out  to  the 
adult  Indians  on  the  reservations,  because  eating  the 
bread  of  charity  will  sap  the  sturdiest  human  char 
acter;  but  is  it  any  better  to  carry  off  the  children 
indiscriminately,  train  them  to  despise  practically  all 
that  their  race  stands  for,  and  saturate  them  with  the 
idea  that,  for  whatever  they  wish,  they  have  only 
to  draw  upon  a  rich  and  indulgent  government  ?  And, 
even  putting  the  best  face  upon  it,  does  the  upbringing 


78  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

of  an  individual  here  and  there  mean  the  improve 
ment  of  a  race  ? 

These  comments  will  show  why  I  have  always 
believed  that  the  key  to  the  problem  of  Indian  educa 
tion  lies  not  in  establishing  more  of  the  big  institu- 
>  tions,  but  in  the  multiplication  of  the  little  day-schools 
to  which  the  children  can  come  every  morning  and 
from  which  they  can  go  home  every  night.  In  the 
family  circle  the  children  describe  the  day's  happen 
ings  at  school,  and  the  parents  absorb  unconsciously 
some  of  the  message  the  teacher  is  bringing  from  the 
outside  world.  The  teacher,  in  turn,  catches  some  of 
the  atmosphere  of  the  home  from  the  children,  and 
is  able  to  do  better  work  with  them  in  consequence. 
Through  the  mutual  understanding  thus  developed, 
an  opening  is  made  for  the  missionary;  and  when  you 
have  a  whole  camp  or  village  subject  to  the  leaven, 
it  seems  to  me  you  are  contributing  to  a  scheme  of 
race  elevation  on  pretty  broad  lines. 

Take  still  another  view  of  the  question.  We  gather 
a  small  army  of  children  from  camp  and  cabin,  where 
all  living  is  strictly  from  hand  to  mouth,  and  place 
them  in  a  huge  school  which  to  their  dazzled  eyes 
seems  like  a  town,  and  where  mechanical  devices  sup 
plant  hand  labor  as  far  as  practicable.  As  a  precau 
tion  against  fire  the  buildings  are  lighted  by  electricity 
instead  of  candles  or  lamps,  so  that  whoever  desires 
to  illuminate  a  room  can  do  so  by  merely  pressing 
a  button  in  the  wall.  In  order  to  save  time  and 
energy  where  so  many  human  beings  are  collected  un 
der  one  roof,  the  washing  of  clothes  and  bedding 
is  done  in  a  modern  laundry.  The  entire  premises 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR    79 

are  heated  from  a  central  plant,  whence  the  warm 
air  or  steam  is  conducted  through  pipes  to  wherever 
it  is  wanted,  and  may  be  set  free  by  the  turning  of 
a  screw.  The  food  is  prepared  in  great  cauldrons 
and  bake-ovens  connected  with  a  mammoth  range, 
or  a  series  of  ranges,  fed  with  coal.  Everything  else 
that  ministers  to  the  needs  of  daily  existence  is  done 
on  a  similar  grand  scale. 

How  far  does  all  this  go  toward  elevating  the  red 
race?  How  many  of  the  children,  whose  whole  con 
ception  of  life  outside  of  an  Indian  camp  is  founded 
on  their  experiences  at  such  a  school,  will  be  fitted 
thereby  to  cope  with  the  conditions  amid  which  they 
will  be  thrown  after  graduation?  Those  who  go  back 
to  their  old  homes  will  find  nothing  there  correspond 
ing  to  what  they  have  had  about  them  during  their 
pupilage.  Or,  if  they  settle  in  some  white  community 
and  try  to  earn  their  living  in  any  of  the  pursuits  open 
to  them,  how  many  will  find  themselves  so  situated 
that  they  can  light  their  rooms  by  pressing  a  but 
ton  or  heat  them  by  turning  a  screw,  or  cleanse  their 
garments  in  a  laundry  started  by  a  pull  on  a  lever, 
or  have  their  bodily  comfort  generally  looked  after 
by  persons  hired  to  take  care  of  them? 

"  But,"  argues  the  advocate  of  the  segregation  sys 
tem,  "  surely  the  pupil  is  led  a  little  farther  along 
the  path  of  civilization  by  learning  to  wear  a  night 
gown  to  bed,  to  sleep  between  sheets,  and  to  eat  his 
meals  from  a  table  with  a  knife  and  fork,  instead 
of  throwing  himself  on  the  ground  at  night  and  sleep 
ing  in  the  clothes  he  has  worn  all  day,  or  maybe  for 
many  days,  and  clawing  his  food  out  of  the  common 


80  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

frying-pan  with  his  fingers !  "  Undoubtedly.  Still,  he 
does  not  need  a  long  separation  from  his  home  for 
that.  In  Red  Man's  Land,  day-schools  differ  consid 
erably  from  those  in  our  populous  centres.  Besides 
the  "  three  R's,"  most  of  them  teach  the  girls  such 
things  as  simple  sewing,  the  rudiments  of  cookery,  how 
to  wash  their  clothes  in  a  tub,  how  to  make  a  bed 
and  set  a  table.  The  boys  are  taught  to  raise  a  few 
vegetables,  perhaps  to  take  care  of  a  cow  or  some 
pigs,  to  keep  up  a  wood  fire  in  a  cookstove,  to  draw 
and  carry  water  from  a  well,  to  make  rude  repairs 
with  a  hammer  and  nails,  to  sweep  and  dig  and  do 
other  work  which  should  fall  to  the  stronger  members 
of  a  household.  Both  sexes  are  drilled  in  the  practice 
of  bodily  cleanliness,  keeping  their  effects  in  order, 
and  eating  properly  the  little  lunch  which  is  set  be 
fore  them  at  noon.  In  short,  what  they  learn  at  the 
day-school  is  a  step  above  anything  known  at  home, 
but  only  a  step,  easily  mastered — not  a  sudden  flight 
to  heights  hitherto  undreamed  of.  Any  one  who  is 
skeptical  of  the  difference  between  the  two  methods 
of  training,  need  only  go  into  Red  Man's  Land  and 
study  their  respective  effects  on  the  communities 
there. 

But  we  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  the 
Indians  are  rapidly  becoming  citizens,  and  as  such 
are  coming  into  relations  with  the  public  educational 
establishments  of  the  states  in  which  they  reside.  Sev 
eral  years  ago  a  wise  movement  was  begun,  to  en 
courage  those  Indians  who  lived  near  enough  to  any 
common  school  to  send  their  children  there  instead 
of  to  a  distinctively  Indian  school.  I  was  able,  while 


OLD  APACHE  WOMAN. 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR   81 

in  office,  to  carry  this  policy  a  stage  farther,  by  open 
ing  Indian  schools  to  white  pupils — a  privilege  which 
it  seemed  might  be  welcomed  by  settlers  who  had 
taken  up  homesteads  in  a  newly  opened  reservation. 
The  main  object  in  both  cases  was  the  same — to  bring 
about  the  mingling  of  the  two  races  in  childhood,  so 
that  as  the  young  people  grew  up  they  would  have 
a  more  friendly  feeling  toward  each  other.  The  plan 
has  succeeded  sporadically  rather  than  uniformly.  In 
most  neighborhoods  with  a  mixed  population  the 
whites  have  been  glad  to  let  Indian  children  attend 
the  public  schools  as  long  as  the  government  would 
pay  the  cost  of  their  tuition.  In  others,  white  parents 
have  objected  to  letting  Indian  children  mingle  with 
theirs,  not  on  grounds  of  race  prejudice,  but  because 
the  homes  from  which  the  little  Indians  come  are  so 
often  ill-kept,  loosely  disciplined,  and  unwholesome, 
that  infection  is  feared,  moral  as  well  as  physical. 
Again,  not  a  few  Indian  parents  have  kept  their  chil 
dren  out  of  the  common  schools  because,  in  their 
ragged  and  unkempt  condition,  they  have  been  made 
butts  for  the  ridicule  of  thoughtless  white  playmates. 
These,  however,  are  exceptions  to  a  rule  based  gen 
erally  on  common  sense. 

The  policy  just  described  will,  it  is  hoped,  help 
bridge  the  gap  between  the  past  centuries  of  racial 
separation  and  the  dawning  era  during  which  the 
red  man  will  take  his  place  with  the  rest  of  us  in 
the  body  politic.  Changed  conditions  in  the  West 
ern  country  have  convinced  a  majority  of  our  peo 
ple  that  the  practice  of  the  fathers,  of  keeping  red 
men  and  white  as  far  as  possible  out  of  reach  of  each 


8£  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

other,  was  the  worst  sort  of  a  makeshift,  and  we 
are  reversing  it  as  fast  as  we  can.  The  army,  for 
instance,  which  began  by  organizing  separate  Indian 
troops,  now  enlists  Indians  on  the  same  footing  and 
for  the  same  service  as  whites,  mixing  them  in  the 
ranks.  In  the  navy,  Indian  seamen  are,  as  a  rule,  the 
most  popular  members  of  the  crews  to  which  they 
are  attached.  Indian  athletes  compete  in  the  world's 
contests.  Indian  politicians  can  aspire  to  any  office 
in  the  gift  of  their  fellow-citizens  without  risking 
a  rebuff  on  account  of  their  blood. 

More  important  than  all,  in  the  light  of  its  ultimate 
benefit  to  the  Indian,  is  his  steadily  increasing  promi 
nence  in  the  Western  labor  markets  as  a  fellow- 
!  worker  and  rival  of  the  men  of  other  races.  Almost 
my  first  act  as  Commissioner,  and  the  one  in  which 
I  feel  perhaps  the  greatest  satisfaction,  was  the  es 
tablishment  of  an  employment  agency,  which  should 
find  jobs  for  Indian  laborers  and  Indian  laborers  for 
jobs,  outside  of  the  reservations.  Why  "  outside " 
is  it  asked  ?  Because,  to  the  Indians  who  have  neither 
taste  nor  talent  for  farming,  or  who  lack  the  land  and 
implements  and  education  necessary  to  follow  that 
calling  successfully,  the  reservations  offer  no  incen 
tives  to  industry,  but  every  possible  temptation  to 
idleness  and  vice.  On  reservations  where  rations  have 
been  abolished,  efforts  have  been  made  to  invent  some 
artificial  pretence  of  work  which  the  Indians  can  do, 
and  thus  go  through  the  form  of  earning  from  the 
government  the  wages  needed  to  buy  their  provender. 
But  this  is  so  hollow  a  mockery  that  the  Indians  see 
through  it,  and  laugh  among  themselves  at  the  stu- 


RED  MAN  AND  HIS  WHITE  NEIGHBOR   83 

pidity  of  the  whites  in  supposing  that  it  deceives 
anybody.  All  the  moral  effect  of  industry  is  lost, 
of  course,  upon  a  man  who  realizes  that  the  task  he 
is  set  to  perform  is  not  productive  labor,  but  a  rather 
cheap  means  of  cloaking  charity  in  the  guise  of  self- 
support. 


IV 

THE  RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL 
ORDER 


I  am  getting  old  now,  and  I  am  getting  up  in  years,  and  all 
I  wish  at  the  present  time  is  for  my  children  to  grow  up  in 
dustrious  and  work,  because  they  cannot  get  honor  in  war  as 
I  used  to  get  it.  They  can  get  honor  only  by  working  hard. 
I  cannot  teach  my  children  the  way  my  father  taught  me,  that 
the  way  to  get  honor  is  to  go  to  war ;  but  I  can  teach  my  children 
that  the  way  to  get  honor  is  to  go  to  work,  and  be  good  men 
and  women. — CHIEF  RUNNING  BIRD,  of  the  Kiowas. 

It  is  often  said  that  the  Indian  child,  after  receiving  the  best 
education  that  we  can  give,  will  return  to  barbarism  at  the  first 
opportunity.  It  is  a  fact  that  some  Indian  children  and  youth 
do  go  back  to  the  blanket  and  their  wild  life.  How  can  they 
help  it?  ...  Those  who  have  been  most  successful  in  civilizing 
Indians,  brought  about  a  gradual  separation  from  savage  ways 
of  living,  and  introduced  various  peaceful  industries  among 
them.  It  was  a  necessity.  There  is  no  virtue  which  I  have  not 
seen  exemplified  in  some  of  the  different  Indian  tribes  with 
which  I  have  had  to  do.  As  a  rule,  they  kept  their  promises 
to  me  with  wonderful  fidelity,  often  putting  themselves  to  ex 
traordinary  exertion  and  peril. — GENERAL  O.  O.  HOWARD. 


IV 

THE  RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER 

WHAT  we  Caucasians  call  society  is  a  very 
complex  affair,  and  we  cannot  wonder  that 
the  Indian  finds  it  so  hard  to  understand. 
By  way  of  a  crude  analogy,  imagine  a  newsboy  taken 
suddenly  out  of  the  streets  and  given  a  responsible 
position  in  a  modern  department  store.  You  may 
reason  that  he  has  learned  to  buy  his  papers  every 
day  for  one  cent  apiece  and  sell  them  for  two  cents, 
and  that  this  embraces  all  the  essential  principles  of 
trade;  but  of  a  thousand  boys  thus  translated  from 
their  narrow  sphere  of  direct  activity  to  one  involving 
the  highest  degree  of  organization,  the  most  elabo 
rate  division  of  labor,  the  closest  calculations,  and 
the  largest  risks,  how  many  do  you  believe  would  be 
able  to  cope  with  the  multitude  of  new  elements 
brought  into  their  lives? 

Now  proceed  a  step  further  and  suppose  that,  when 
your  newsboy  shrinks  back  appalled  and  declares  that 
he  would  rather  remain  in  his  old  business  in  spite 
of  its  hourly  hardships  and  its  insignificant  rewards, 
you  tell  him  that  that  is  out  of  the  question;  that  you 
know  better  than  he  does  what  will  most  promote 
his  welfare;  that  what  you  are  offering  him  is  a  great 
immediate  boon,  and  a  yet  greater  opportunity  for 

87' 


88  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

himself  and  his  posterity;  that  he  ought  to  be  de 
voutly  thankful  for  such  blessings;  and  that,  whether 
he  is  or  not,  you  are  going  to  compel  him  to  accept 
them:  there  you  have  the  nearest  conceivable  parallel 
to  the  situation  of  the  American  Indian.  Accustomed 
always,  and  descended  from  ancestors  always  accus 
tomed,  to  a  mode  of  living  as  simple  as  that  of  the 
patriarchs  of  ancient  Israel,  he  is  suddenly  confronted 
with  a  social  system  too  labyrinthine  for  his  compre 
hension,  and  required  to  make  himself  a  vital  part 
of  it.  Let  us  see  what  this  involves. 

Even  were  we  to  waive  entirely  the  moral  aspects 
of  the  matter,  like  the  degrading  effect  of  substi 
tuting  whim  for  purpose,  and  convenience  for  obliga 
tion,  in  regulating  the  relations  of  the  sexes  among 
his  people,  we  still  must  recognize  the  necessity  of 
making  the  Indian  conform  to  our  customs  with  re 
gard  to  marriage  and  divorce  in  order  to  safeguard 
his  property  interests.  No  person  has  a  right  to  bring 
children  into  the  world  and  deliberately  leave  them 
helpless  and  dependent  on  the  community;  yet  that 
is  what  happens  if  we  make  the  marriage  tie  so  easily 
soluble  as  to  put  it  into  the  power  of  a  fickle-minded 
parent  to  change  domestic  partners  practically  at  will. 
In  Red  Man's  Land  I  have  had  occasionally  to 
straighten  out  tangles  in  the  property  claims  of  chil 
dren  of  three  or  four  successive  marriages  made  by 
one  man  or  one  woman,  or  by  a  man  and  woman  who, 
after  starting  a  family,  separated  and  took  each  a 
fresh  partner  or  a  series  of  partners.  Such  a  task  is 
hampered  at  every  turn  by  the  difference  between  the 
common  law  of  descent  among  Indians  and  whites. 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   89 

respectively.  It  is  almost  the  universal  rule  in  Indian 
tribes  that  descent  is  traced  through  the  mother,  and 
this  is  undoubtedly  the  natural  course,  because  there 
never  need  be  any  uncertainty  as  to  who  is  the  mother 
of  a  child;  but  the  rule  which  is  as  nearly  universal 
in  Caucasian  communities  is  the  precise  opposite  of 
this.  Our  departure  from  nature  has  its  origin  in  our 
desire  to  fortify  the  popular  ideals  of  family  unity, 
the  sanctity  of  marriage,  and  the  purity  of  the  home. 
By  recognizing  the  father  as  the  vehicle  of  descent, 
and,  to  that  extent,  of  inheritance,  we  emphasize  the 
material  importance  of  assuring  the  chastity  of  the 
mother,  which  is  one  point  gained  for  morality,  at 
least. 

The  practice  of  polygamy  among  the  Indians  has 
never  been  so  common  as  is  generally  supposed.  The 
broad  rule  of  monogamy,  subject  to  exception  under 
certain  conditions,  was  based  wholly  on  economic  con 
siderations.  A  very  young  man  could  scarcely  hope 
to  make  such  success  in  war,  the  chase,  or  pastoral 
pursuits  as  would  warrant  his  trying  to  take  care  of 
more  than  one  wife;  so  polygamy,  where  we  have 
found  it  at  all,  has  been  confined  almost  entirely  to 
the  few  older  men  who,  having  achieved  prominence 
and  a  fair  supply  of  worldly  comforts,  took  pride  in 
their  excess  of  wives  as  an  index  of  their  prosperity, 
just  as  successful  white  men  often  parade  their  landed 
estates  and  their  magnificent  scale  of  living. 

A  far  worse  evil  lies  in  promiscuity.  The  polyga- 
mist  who  takes  good  care  of  three  wives  at  once,  and 
of  all  the  children  they  bear  him,  is  an  exemplary 
member  of  society  by  contrast  with  the  man  who 


90  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

takes  to  himself  three  wives  in  rapid  succession,  cast 
ing  off  one  without  ceremony  as  soon  as  another 
attracts  his  fancy,  and  ignoring  his  obligations  to 
the  children  of  each  from  the  moment  he  deserts 
her  for  her  successor.  Lately  a  campaign  has  been 
begun  to  break  up  the  practice  of  fleeting  marriages 
and  indiscriminate  dissolutions  by  requiring  Indians, 
when  they  wish  to  be  divorced,  to  resort  to  the  proc 
esses  prescribed  by  statute  in  the  states  of  their  resi 
dence.  Even  in  those  states  where  divorce  is  easiest, 
this  requirement  has  the  effect  of  warning  the  Indi 
ans  that  marriage  and  divorce  are  matters  of  too  great 
consequence  to  depend  on  the  impulse  of  the  mo 
ment;  and  thus  it  lays  in  their  minds  the  foundations 
of  respect  for  law  generally. 

The  cultivation  of  a  higher  esteem  for  the  mar 
riage  bond  has  been  helped  in  no  small  degree  by 
a  plan,  instituted  about  the  beginning  of  the  present 
century,  of  keeping  at  every  agency  a  system  of  fam 
ily  records  for  the  Indians  under  its  jurisdiction. 
This  not  only  involves  the  careful  entry  of  all  births, 
deaths,  and  marriages  as  they  occur,  but  an  inquiry 
into  the  ancestry  and  collateral  relationships  of  living 
Indians,  as  far  as  the  facts  are  obtainable  from  the 
older  people  of  the  tribe.  At  first,  the  Indians  were 
very  wary  of  giving  such  information,  not  under 
standing  why  any  one  should  ask  for  it,  and  suspect 
ing  that  behind  the  whole  business  lurked  another 
trick  of  the  white  people  to  take  something  away  from 
them.  They  are  responding  more  readily  now. 

A  feature  of  our  social  order  which  the  red  man 
was  most  reluctant  to  adopt  was  that  of  land-owner- 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   91 

ship.  Our  idea  of  fencing  in  a  certain  portion  of 
the  soil  and  establishing  an  indefeasible  claim  to  it 
which  we  can  convey  to  a  purchaser,  or  transmit 
to  our  individual  posterity,  was  foreign  to  everything 
in  his  traditions.  Although  every  tribe  had  its  rec 
ognized  territory  to  inhabit,  land  was,  in  the  aborig 
inal  view,  one  of  those  necessaries  of  life  which,  by 
virtue  of  their  character,  must  always  remain  com 
mon  property.  Among  the  hunting  tribes  its  chief  use 
was  to  afford  a  range  for  the  wild  game  animals; 
among  the  pastoral  tribes  it  was  valuable  only  as 
a  place  to  graze  sheep  or  cattle;  while  among  the 
agricultural  Indians  of  the  Southwest  it  was  parceled 
out  periodically  to  those  who  would  be  sure  to  use 
it,  or  to  the  most  active  partisans  of  the  element  in 
power  in  the  village  government.  I  need  not  go  again 
into  the  story  of  how  we  revolutionized  everything 
in  this  domain;  and,  first  by  the  purchase  or  conquest 
of  successive  tracts  of  territory,  then  by  the  reserva 
tion  system,  and  finally  by  the  allotment  process,  grad 
ually  forced  the  white  custom  of  individual  and  com 
plete  land-ownership  upon  the  native  people. 

A  close  kindred  exists,  of  course,  between  our  way 
of  dealing  with  land,  the  most  stable  of  all  our  forms 
of  property,  and  our  system  of  jurisprudence,  the 
most  stable  of  all  our  public  institutions.  So,  after 
introducing  into  the  newly  opened  country  the  idea 
of  abstract  landlord  rights  as  distinguished  from  oc 
cupancy  of  the  soil  dependent  on  its  utilization  for 
subsistence  purposes,  the  white  colonists  set  up  their 
courts  of  justice  and  transplanted  here  the  great  body 
of  law  and  the  fixed  forms  of  procedure  which  their 


92  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

fathers  had  developed  in  the  Old  World  as  the  fruit 
of  centuries  of  struggle  and  study.  To  these,  and  to 
anything  resembling  them,  the  Indian  was  a  total 
stranger.  When  he  engaged  in  a  dispute  with  a 
neighbor,  if  neither  party  was  disposed  to  violence 
as  a  quick  means  of  settling  the  issue,  they  referred 
the  whole  matter  to  a  council  of  old  and  wise  men, 
who  heard  them  state  their  differences  and  then 
reached  a  decision  after  long  and  solemn  deliberation. 
Nearly  always  the  council  advised  a  compromise,  and 
the  force  of  tribal  opinion  was  so  effective  that  the 
disputant  would  have  been  rash,  indeed,  who  refused 
to  carry  it  out  in  good  faith.  There  were  no  writ 
ten  records,  no  citation  of  precedents  other  than  tribal 
custom,  no  formulation  of  principles  to  govern  simi 
lar  cases  for  all  time,  no  appeal  to  higher  tribunals 
from  adverse  rulings.  Whatever  was  done,  was  done 
for  the  conclusion  of  the  present  controversy  and  the 
satisfaction  of  the  present  parties,  leaving  the  past 
undisturbed  and  the  future  to  take  care  of  itself. 

As  soon  as  the  government  began  systematically  to 
parcel  out  the  land  of  the  Indians,  it  was  obliged  to 
attach  a  permanent  and  practicable  name  to  every 
Indian,  whereby  he  could  be  identified  on  the  rolls 
of  his  tribe  and  in  the  deeds  issued  to  him.  Such 
names  as  Big  Thunder  and  Leaping  Crow,  for  in 
stance,  could  be  utilized  without  change,  but  one  like 
Pulls-the-Bear-into-the-Canyon  was  a  different  mat 
ter.  Hence  arose  the  grotesque  array  found  on  some 
of  the  rosters,  where  a  Christopher  Columbus,  a 
George  Washington,  and  an  Abraham  Lincoln  stand 
side  by  side  with  a  Yellow  Cloud  and  an  Omaha  Jim. 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   93 

Recent  years  have  brought  more  sanity,  and  the  rule 
is  now  to  retain,  wherever  that  is  possible,  at  least 
a  part  of  the  Indian  name  borne  by  the  tribesman 
among  his  own  people. 

In  the  matter  of  costume,  I  never  could  see  why 
we  should  not  allow  the  Indian  the  same  latitude  we 
grant  to  members  of  other  races.  If  a  white  man 
preferred  a  suit  of  chain-armor  to  one  of  broadcloth, 
I  suppose  we  should  set  it  down  to  eccentricity,  and 
think  no  more  about  it.  Even  on  the  score  of  mod 
esty  it  is  possible  to  draw  distinctions  more  nice  than 
logical.  In  an  iron  foundry,  or  the  engine-hold  of 
a  steamship,  we  find  men  stripped  to  the  waist,  and 
at  an  athletic  contest  bare  legs  are  the  rule;  yet  our 
only  comment  is  that  the  clothing — or  the  lack  of 
it — in  such  cases  is  adapted  to  the  work  to  be  done. 
The  swimmer  crops  his  hair  as  short  as  he  can,  while 
the  football-player  cultivates  a  mop,  and  it  does  not 
occur  to  any  of  us  to  criticise  the  contrast,  because 
each  extreme  has  a  purpose  behind  it.  To  the  Indian, 
however,  conventional  observers  concede  no  such 
range  of  liberty.  If  he  wears  his  hair  in  long  braids 
and  discards  a  hat,  or  folds  a  blanket  about  him  as 
a  substitute  for  an  overcoat,  he  is  pronounced  a  sav 
age  without  more  ado,  and  every  effort  is  made  to 
change  his  habits  in  these  regards. 

Are  we  not  thus  attending  too  much  to  externals, 
at  the  risk  of  distracting  attention  proportionally  from 
things  of  more  vital  importance  to  him?  Wherever 
his  attire  conflicts  with  decency  or  health,  we  are 
bound  to  demand  its  discontinuance;  but  from  that 
point  onward,  would  it  not  be  wiser  to  drop  admoni- 


94  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

tions  and  trust  to  the  lessons  of  experience?  When 
he  discovers  that  there  are  practical  advantages  in 
a  well-scrubbed  skin,  that  keeping  his  hair  at  easy 
combing  length  frequently  relieves  him  of  discomforts 
incidental  to  its  neglect,  and  that  a  man  who  is  sawing 
wood  or  guiding  a  plough  has  other  uses  for  his 
hands  than  holding  a  blanket  about  him,  the  paint  and 
the  braids  and  the  blanket  will  fall  away  of  them 
selves,  never  to  return. 

The  same  is  true  of  his  mode  of  life  generally. 
When  we  persuade  him  to  live  in  a  solid  house  in 
stead  of  a  tent,  I  am  by  no  means  sure  that  we  are 
doing  him  a  good  turn.  In  spite  of  its  being  a  sym 
bol  of  permanency  and  thrift,  his  house  increases  his 
sensitiveness  to  cold,  and  discourages  ventilation,  leav 
ing  him  more  susceptible  to  tuberculosis.  Also,  his 
old  practice  of  shifting  his  habitation  from  place  to 
place  whenever  the  ground  around  it  became  foul  from 
accumulated  refuse,  was  a  fairly  effective  insurance 
against  filth  diseases,  as  shown  by  the  fact  that  far 
worse  epidemics  have  prevailed  among  tribes  who 
lived  in  houses  than  among  those  whose  shelters  were 
readily  removable. 

A  condition  much  more  troublesome  to  handle  has 
to  do  with  dancing  and  kindred  ceremonials.  As  we 
have  seen,  the  dance  began  not  as  a  recreation,  but 
as  a  religious  function.  A  war  dance,  for  example, 
was  conducted  for  the  purpose  of  conciliating  the 
divinities  who  presided  over  arms  and  bloodshed,  so 
that  the  band  performing  the  dance  might  be  favored 
in  battle  and  triumph  over  their  enemies;  a  corn 
dance,  or  a  harvest  dance,  was  a  special  homage  paid 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   95 

to  the  agricultural  divinities  who  were  expected  to 
respond  by  increasing  the  fruits  of  the  earth;  and 
so  on  through  the  list.  Now,  no  matter  how  earnestly 
one  may  desire  to  convince  an  Indian  that  he  can 
accomplish  nothing  by  such  appeals,  it  is  a  waste  of 
energy  to  try  to  reason  out  this  conclusion  by  the 
usual  processes  of  logic;  and  even  after  an  Indian 
has  embraced  a  more  spiritual  religion,  his  conserva 
tism  often  will  betray  itself,  if  not  in  his  secret  par 
ticipation  in  the  old  rites,  at  least  in  an  attitude 
toward  them  which  shows  what  a  wrench  it  costs  to 
tear  himself  free  from  the  superstitions  inherited  from 
his  ancestors,  and  instilled  into  him  from  babyhood 
by  the  elders  of  his  tribe. 

Unhappily,  however  sincere  may  have  been  the  mo 
tives  of  their  participants  in  the  old  days  when  a 
real  importance  was  attached  to  the  tribal  dances, 
these  have  become,  under  modern  conditions,  among 
the  strongest  influences  for  race  demoralization.  The 
younger  generation  see  in  them  nothing  of  their  an 
cient  significance,  but  only  a  colorful  mummery,  kept 
alive  for  tradition's  sake.  The  white  people  in  the 
neighborhood,  drawn  to  the  dances  at  first  by  curi 
osity,  presently  turned  them  to  commercial  account 
by  advertising  their  attractions  to  visitors  from  afar, 
with  the  result  which  always  follows  making  mer 
chandise  of  a  religious  observance.  As  fast  as  their 
primitive  dignity  was  wrung  out  of  such  ceremonials, 
vulgarity  crowded  into  its  place.  Liquor  began  to  be 
smuggled  in  to  inflame  the  dancers  and  debauch  the 
attendant  Indians.  The  red  women  and  girls  natu 
rally  have  been  the  chief  sufferers  from  the  change, 


96  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

till  by  degrees  the  camps  surrounding  some  of  the 
great  dances  have  been  converted  into  open  markets 
of  vice,  with  all  that  that  description  stands  for. 

It  is  the  dancing  habit,  too,  which  most  sadly  in 
terferes  with  the  Indian's  progress  as  an  industrial 
worker.  He  will  accept  employment  at  good  wages, 
where  he  has  a  fine  outlook  for  increasing  his  skill 
and  thereby  improving  his  worldly  condition;  for 
a  month  or  six  weeks,  perhaps,  he  will  remain  stead 
ily  at  his  job;  but  by  that  time,  if  he  has  accumulated 
a  little  money,  the  chances  are  that  he  will  wish  to 
go  home  to  take  part  in  a  dance  which  is  to  be  held 
at  his  camp  on  a  day  when  the  sun  shall  rise  behind 
a  certain  notch  in  the  eastern  hills.  I  assume  that 
eventually  he  will  be  educated  to  greater  steadfastness 
in  industry  by  the  same  hard  experience  which  has 
taught  the  rest  of  us  that  if  any  will  not  work,  neither 
shall  he  eat. 

The  dance  has  yet  another  serious  aspect :  it  is  one 
of  the  instrumentalities  used  by  the  medicine-man,  or 
native  healer,  in  the  cure  of  disease;  and  until  this 
superstition  can  be  uprooted  we  cannot  hope  to  make 
much  headway  with  public  sanitation  among  the  In 
dians.  In  a  case  of  individual  illness,  after  the  in 
cantations  of  the  medicine-man  have  failed  to  pro 
duce  any  effect,  a  sufferer  will  sometimes  seek  an 
educated  physician,  to  see  whether  the  "  white  man's 
medicine "  may  perchance  have  some  merit  when 
added  to  "  Indian  medicine."  But  public  sanitation 
is  a  different  thing;  being  preventive  rather  than 
curative,  it  touches  a  phase  of  the  health  question 
which  is  quite  beyond  the  horizon  of  the  Indian's 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   97 

observation.  To  his  fatalistic  mind  it  seems  a  use 
less  expenditure  of  trouble  to  keep  the  camp  and  its 
inmates  always  clean  as  a  precaution  against  epi 
demics:  when  an  epidemic  comes,  as  it  is  bound  to 
from  time  to  time,  a  big  dance  can  be  held  to  exorcise 
the  demons  that  brought  it  on,  and  then  all  the  sur 
vivors  will  be  well  and  happy  again!  So  the  In 
dians  in  the  camp  continue  to  live  as  they  have  always 
lived,  and  allow  their  places  of  abode  to  become  as 
dirty  as  they  may;  the  victims  of  skin  diseases  pass 
them  on  to  their  well  neighbors  by  sharing  the  same 
clothes,  bedding,  and  domestic  utensils;  while  tubercu 
lar  patients  spit  recklessly  in  all  directions. 

Our  race  inherits  in  its  blood  a  genius  for  organiza 
tion  and  a  respect  for  authority  when  it  places  the 
welfare  of  the  community  above  the  convenience  of 
the  individual;  but  the  red  men  have  always  disre 
garded  the  regulations  of  the  Indian  Office  designed 
to  protect  them  from  epidemics,  and  the  inadequacy 
of  the  laws  which  make  the  office  responsible  for  the 
well-being  of  the  Indians  but  leave  it  powerless  to 
compel  submission  to  its  orders  must  be  blamed  for 
the  ravages  of  disease  on  the  reservations.  Till  1908, 
about  the  only  attention  Congress  had  given  to  In 
dian  health  conditions  was  represented  by  an  annual 
appropriation  of  five  thousand  dollars  for  the  suppres 
sion  of  smallpox  outbreaks.  As  to  everything  else, 
the  physicians  connected  with  the  several  agencies,  or 
those  in  private  practice  near  by  who  were  under  con 
tract  with  the  government  to  answer  calls  from  In 
dians,  were  left  to  handle  whatever  came  along  as 
best  they  might.  During  the  winter  of  1908-09,  one 


98  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

of  our  Supervisors,  a  woman  who  had  made  a  special 
study  of  such  subjects,  came  on  from  Phoenix,  Ari 
zona,  to  tell  me  that  the  "  sore  eyes "  so  common 
among  Indians  thereabout  had  been  definitely  diag 
nosed  as  trachoma.  It  had  spread  so  through  the 
large  government  school  at  Phoenix  that  there  was 
some  talk  among  the  medical  men  of  the  town  about 
requiring  the  municipal  authorities  to  proclaim  a  quar 
antine  against  the  institution.  Without  a  moment's 
delay  I  took  the  Supervisor  with  me  to  the  Capitol, 
where  we  called  on  the  chairmen  of  the  two  com 
mittees  of  Congress  who  had  jurisdiction  of  Indian 
affairs,  and  within  an  hour  procured  the  promise  of 
an  emergency  appropriation  of  $12,000,  immediately 
available.  With  this  money  in  hand,  I  set  up  a 
trachoma  hospital  at  the  Phoenix  school,  open  to  the 
Indians  of  the  surrounding  country,  and  made  it  a 
training-place  for  our  own  agency  physicians  and 
nurses,  brought,  a  few  at  a  time,  from  all  parts  of 
the  West.  This  was  the  first  step  in  the  aggressive 
warfare  the  government  is  now  waging  against  in 
fectious  disorders  among  the  Indians.  Next,  I  be 
gan  the  reorganization  of  the  medical  branch  of  the 
Indian  Service,  and  opened  sanitarium  schools  for 
children  physically  unfit  to  attend  those  of  the  ordinary 
sort. 

Home  life  like  that  which  with  us  lies  at  the  core 
of  everything  social,  is  practically  unknown  among 
the  Indians  in  their  primitive  state.  They  live  to 
gether  in  families,  it  is  true,  all  the  members  of  a 
family  sharing  its  dwelling.  They  meet  in  one  place 
to  eat  and  drink  and  sleep,  to  make  their  garments 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER   99 

and  prepare  their  weapons;  but  of  the  subtler  kind  of 
enjoyment  which  the  Caucasian  finds  in  his  home, 
and  which  distinguishes  that  home  from  a  mere  en 
closure  for  shelter,  the  Indian  is  ignorant.  In  his 
crude  way  he  extends  hospitality  to  his  guests;  but 
its  scope  is  confined  to  laying  before  them  food  to 
satisfy  their  hunger  and  assigning  them  space  in  which 
to  roll  themselves  in  their  blankets  and  stretch  out 
their  bodies  for  the  night.  Social  intercourse  com 
monly  consists  of  spreading  a  feast  and  exchanging 
stories  of  prowess  in  hunting  or  in  the  presence  of 
an  enemy.  Until  a  spirit  of  emulation  was  stirred 
among  the  Indian  women  by  the  missionaries  and 
the  government  matrons,  there  was  none  of  the  pride 
of  good  housekeeping  which  we  find  among  even  the 
humblest  white  wives  and  mothers. 

A  great  deal  has  been  accomplished  in  this  direc 
tion  by  the  tribal  fairs  which  have  been  held  for  sev 
eral  years  now  in  certain  reservations.  At  these 
shows,  the  competition  is  keen  not  only  among  the 
Indians  who  farm  and  who  struggle  to  produce  the 
largest  ears  of  corn,  the  heaviest  potatoes  and  beets 
and  melons,  but  also  among  the  women,  who  con 
test  for  prizes  offered  for  the  neatest  tepee,  the  most 
palatable  cookery,  the  best  appointed  dinner-table,  and 
the  most  sensibly  dressed  children.  In  their  whole 
some  rivalry  we  can  detect  the  initial  glimmerings 
of  a  home-making  ideal  like  that  which  we  find  among 
the  best  women  of  our  own  race. 

If  we  tried  to  put  into  one  phrase  a  description 
of  the  Indians'  social  system,  we  should  have  to  call 
it  a  patriarchal  communism.  The  patriarchal  basis 


100  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

underlies  everything;  and  while  there  may  not  be, 
strictly  speaking,  a  common  ownership  of  property, 
yet  the  necessaries  of  life  are  so  far  recognized  as 
for  the  common  use  that  pauperism,  as  we  know  it, 
is  not  found  among  the  Indians  when  left  to  them 
selves.  The  hungry  man  does  not  beg  for  food:  he 
takes  it  wherever  he  sees  it  in  the  open.  By  this 
I  do  not  mean  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  differ 
ence  of  worldly  estate  among  these  primitive  people. 
On  the  contrary,  there  are  gradations  of  prosperity 
among  them  as  among  us;  only,  wealth  is  measured 
among  them  by  other  standards  than  ours.  One  In 
dian  family  has  more  ponies,  more  cattle,  more  sheep, 
more  blankets,  more  weapons,  more  ornaments  than 
another;  but  if  a  famine  season  comes  on,  the  cattle 
and  sheep  and  ponies  of  the  rich  man  are  slaughtered, 
not  to  keep  their  owner  strong  and  well  while  his 
less  favored  neighbor  starves  to  death,  but  to  sub 
sist  all  who  need  food.  And,  in  general,  the  Indian's 
ambition  to  be  famous  among  his  people  as  a  free 
handed  friend  leads  him  often  to  distribute  all  his 
most  valued  possessions  among  his  fellow-tribesmen 
as  gifts,  though  he  may  himself  suffer  sadly  in  con 
sequence. 

At  the  foundation  of  what  we  Caucasians  call  thrift 
is  the  disposition  to  accumulate.  Nor  can  we  dis 
guise  the  fact  that  thrift  is  with  us  not  merely  a 
proper  desire  to  provide  against  to-morrow's  exigen 
cies,  but  a  craving  to  continue  increasing  the  store 
so  that  one  day  we  may  cease  striving  altogether, 
live  at  ease  ourselves,  and  hand  down  to  our  heirs 
the  means  of  passing  luxurious  lives  unembarrassed 


•Km 


RED  MAN  AND  OUR  SOCIAL  ORDER    101 

by  a  sense  of  disastrous  possibilities.  To  this  aspira 
tion  the  Indian  is  a  stranger  till  we  introduce  him  to 
it  as  a  forward  step  in  his  social  education.  In  his 
eyes,  money  has  no  value  other  than  as  a  medium 
for  procuring  something  he  wishes.  That  procured 
with  a  part  of  his  cash  in  hand,  why  hold  on  to  the 
rest? 

To  him,  too,  next  week  is  as  good  as  this  week 
for  anything  he  wishes  to  do.  It  is  his  daily  marvel 
why  white  men  take  so  much  trouble  to  live:  is  time 
about  to  come  to  a  dead  stop,  that  we  must  hurry 
so,  and  count  the  minutes,  and  postpone  our  rest  and 
comfort  till  a  future  period  when  we  shall  be  too 
old  and  feeble  to  enjoy  them  ?  Alas !  deplore  it  though 
we  may,  we  know  that  we  must  either  keep  pace  with 
our  generation,  or  fall  by  the  wayside  with  the  like 
lihood  of  being  trodden  under  foot;  and  into  this 
whirl  we  are  forced  to  bring  the  Indian,  no  matter 
how  little  he  or  we  may  desire  it.  The  situation  is 
one  not  of  preference,  but  of  vital  necessity.  It  is 
a  waste  of  strength  to  declaim  against  evolutionary 
forces  which  are  far  stronger  than  any  human  instru 
mentality  designed  for  their  control :  the  only  thing 
we  can  do  is  to  accept  the  inevitable,  and  fortify  the 
Indian  to  cope  with  it.  In  this  brotherly  aid  lies  his 
sole  hope  for  the  future. 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED 

MEN 


Ice-built,  ice-bound,  and  sea-bounded! 

Such  cold  seas  of  silence!     Such  room! 
Such  snow-light!     Such  sea-light  confounded 

With  thunder  that  smites  as  a  doom! 
Such   grandeur,   such  glory,   such  gloom! 

— JOAQUIN  MILLER. 

One  of  our  most  devoted  and  honored  Home  Missionaries, 
Dr.  Sheldon  Jackson,  saw  in  the  Russian  reindeer  an  improve 
ment  upon  the  Alaskan  dog  travel,  and  the  full  answer  to  the 
Alaskan's  isolation  and  hunger  and  destitution.  It  meant  en 
durance  and  development  of  the  Alaskan  in  the  face  of  indif 
ference,  jeers,  and  hostile  attacks,  and  at  personal  sacrifice  he 
imported  the  reindeer  and  at  last  confirmed  him  as  the  exact 
need  and  promise  for  that  country. 

We  hear  a  good  deal  about  the  Alaskan  reindeer  to-day,  and 
we  shall  hear  more  to-morrow.  The  politician  is  as  eager  now 
to  claim  as  he  was  before  to  repudiate  and  hinder.  Do  not 
let  it  be  forgotten  that  this  advance  in  civilization  is  due  not  to 
the  politician,  but  to  a  missionary.— DR.  WALLACE  RADCLIFFE. 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN 

IT  will  surprise  many  readers,  doubtless,  to  learn 
that  we  have  aborigines  in  the  United  States  who 
are  not  red  men.  Our  federal  statutes  observe 
the  distinction  by  uniformly  referring  to  them  as 
"  natives,"  or,  where  some  sweeping  provision  of 
law  regarding  the  Indians  is  intended  for  application 
to  all  aborigines  alike,  emphasizing  the  fact.  With 
this  preliminary  understanding,  it  will  seem  less  ex 
traordinary  that  the  expected  people  have  never  been 
placed  under  the  guardianship  of  the  Office  of  In 
dian  Affairs.  They  are  in  charge  of  the  Bureau  of 
Education,  which,  very  appropriately,  has  made  the 
school  system  the  centre  of  its  activities  among  them. 

I  am  alluding  now  to  a  large  proportion  of  the 
native  inhabitants  of  Alaska.  We  did  not  acquire 
that  province  from  Russia  till  1867,  and  then  we 
bought  it,  so  to  speak,  with  our  eyes  shut.  We  had 
only  the  vaguest  notions  about  its  climate,  soil  re 
sources,  or  population,  but  assumed  on  general  prin 
ciples  that  it  was  a  land  of  perpetual  snows,  inhabited 
by  wild  men  who  lived  in  huts  built  of  ice-cakes  and 
subsisted  on  walrus  and  seal  and  polar  bears'  meat. 
Even  the  boundaries  were  so  uncertain  that  it  took 
more  than  thirty  years  to  straighten  some  of  them 

105 


106  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

out;  and  then  we  found  that  this  little-known  region 
was  as  large  as  the  combined  states  of  California, 
Oregon,  Washington,  Idaho,  Montana,  and  New  York, 
or,  in  other  words,  one-fifth  the  size  of  all  the  rest 
of  the  United  States.  It  was  discovered,  also,  that 
instead  of  annexing  a  single  race  of  alien  people,  we 
had  taken  two  or  three  races.  Of  these,  however,  the 
most  distinctive  type  is  found  in  the  Eskimos,  who 
by  inter-marriage,  trading,  and  other  modes  of  af 
filiation,  have  stamped  their  neighbors  with  so  many 
of  their  surface  traits  that  the  ordinary  unscientific 
traveler  is  scarcely  conscious  of  any  differences. 

The  Eskimos  often  are  spoken  of  as  dwarfish  in 
stature;  as  a  matter  of  fact,  there  are  many  men 
among  them  of  giant  build,  and  the  rank  and  file  are 
of  medium  height,  averaging  perhaps  five  feet  and 
four  inches.  Their  clothing,  which  is  made  chiefly 
of  the  skins  of  wild  beasts  dressed  with  the  fur  on, 
and  the  muscular  development  of  their  shoulders  due 
to  the  use  of  the  paddle  for  propelling  their  boats, 
probably  led  to  the  common  error  by  exaggerating 
their  general  breadth  of  body.  They  are  of  a  light 
brownish-yellow  color,  with  a  pink  tint  on  the  more 
prominent  features  like  the  cheeks  and  lips.  They 
have  high  heads,  faces  very  wide  across  at  the  eye- 
line,  bridgeless  noses  which  are  rather  narrow  except 
at  the  nostrils,  and  eyes  of  the  general  shape  which 
we  associate  with  the  Mongolians  of  Asia.  Despite 
their  small  hands  and  feet,  they  possess  wonderful 
strength  and  endurance,  the  women  carrying  enor 
mous  loads  without  discomfort,  and  the  men  being 
able  to  make  occasional  journeys  of  fifty  or  seventy- 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN    107 

five  miles  on  foot  without  stopping  to  sleep.  They 
are  good-humored,  with  a  considerable  degree  of 
natural  intelligence,  and,  until  corrupted  by  foreign 
influences,  truthful  in  their  statements.  While  their 
moral  code  takes  little  note  of  honesty  in  dealing  with 
the  property  of  others,  the  scamp  detected  in  helping 
himself  to  the  seal-meat  or  venison  which  a  neighbor 
has  hidden  in  the  ice  for  future  consumption  may  be 
killed  by  his  victim  without  compunction.  They  will 
cheat  in  a  bargain  with  the  whites  if  they  see  the 
chance,  yet  theft  as  a  trade  seems  to  be  practically 
unknown  among  them,  as  is  also  robbery  with  vio 
lence.  Indeed,  much  of  their  dishonesty  takes  forms 
which  enable  them  to  laugh  it  off  afterward  as  a  bit 
of  practical  joking,  and  their  love  of  fun  is  keen 
enough  to  give  relish  to  a  trick  even  when  turned  upon 
themselves.  They  are  hospitable  in  the  extreme,  and 
polite  to  the  point  of  going  out  of  their  way  to  avoid 
a  speech,  or  act,  which  might  wound  the  feelings  of 
a  stranger.  These  qualities  do  not  prevent  their  being 
very  sensitive  to  ill-treatment,  and  quite  satisfied  of 
their  superiority  to  the  mass  of  the  white  men  who 
visit  their  country.  Nor  must  it  be  inferred  that  their 
mild  manners  mean  any  lack  of  warlike  spirit  when 
aroused.  On  the  contrary,  if  a  quarrel  is  forced  upon 
them,  they  show  the  courage  which  might  be  expected 
of  a  people  accustomed  to  capture  whales  and  fight 
bears  for  a  livelihood. 

In  the  relations  of  the  sexes  among  themselves, 
those  Eskimos  who  still  remain  in  their  primitive 
condition  are  almost  lawless.  Whether  a  man  shall 
take  one  wife  or  many,  or  whether  a  woman  shall 


108  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

have  several  husbands,  seems  to  depend  more  on  the 
numerical  proportion  of  men  to  women  in  a  settle 
ment  than  on  any  other  question.  Women  are  bought 
and  sold  as  chattels,  and  now  and  then  are  exchanged 
between  husbands  after  marriage.  There  is  no  wed 
ding  ceremony  beyond  the  mere  act  of  taking.  A 
wife  being  valuable  chiefly  for  what  she  can  be  made 
to  do  for  the  comfort  of  the  family — like  drying,  stor 
ing,  and  cooking  the  food,  making  and  mending  the 
clothes,  and  repairing  the  boats — her  infidelities  are 
disregarded  except  as  they  may  interfere  with  the 
performance  of  her  duties;  but  prostitution  for  gain 
did  not  exist  among  the  Eskimos  until  the  white 
whalers  began  to  mix  with  them. 

As  the  natives  have  no  uniform  means  of  reckon 
ing  time,  it  is  hard  to  say  at  what  age  the  women 
usually  marry,  but  apparently  they  do  not,  as  a  rule, 
begin  bearing  children  before  they  are  twenty  years 
old.  A  great  many  marriages  are  childless,  and  the 
smallness  of  the  families  into  which  children  do  come 
points  to  the  conclusion  that  the  race  is  on  the  decline. 
The  death-rate  is,  of  course,  much  enhanced  by  the 
ignorance  of  the  parents  as  to  providing  properly  for 
their  little  ones,  and  by  the  hardships  of  the  life  led 
by  all.  A  family  in  which  there  are  children  makes 
much  of  them.  They  are  nursed  till  three  or  four 
years  of  age,  probably  because  the  parents  realize  that 
the  purely  animal  diet  on  which  adults  subsist  would 
be  injurious  to  infants.  A  mother  carries  her  babe 
about  with  her,  huddled  in  a  little  naked  heap  inside 
of  the  loose  clothing  on  her  back,  and  held  in  its  place 
by  her  girdle,  which  for  this  purpose  she  wears  a 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN    109 

trifle  higher  than  usual.  At  intervals  she  loosens 
the  girdle,  and  shifts  the  babe  around  to  her  breast 
without  exposing  it  to  the  air.  After  the  child  has 
become  old  and  strong  enough  to  walk  alone,  it  often 
rides  about  on  her  back,  with  its  legs  straddling  her 
body  and  passing  under  her  arms — pick-a-back,  as  we 
should  style  it.  A  woman  goes  on  with  her  accus 
tomed  work  even  with  a  pretty  heavy  child  hanging 
to  her  in  this  way,  and  apparently  is  not  much  in 
commoded  by  her  burden. 

The  older  children  relieve  their  mother  by  taking 
care  of  the  younger  ones,  who  seldom  quarrel  or  cry, 
and  who,  in  the  absence  of  definite  instruction,  pick 
up  whatever  they  know  of  life  from  observation  and 
imitation.  At  seven  years  a  normal  boy  will  have 
learned  how  to  use  a  small  bow  and  arrow,  and  where 
and  how  to  hunt  for  birds'  eggs.  At  twice  that  age 
it  is  common  to  give  him  a  gun  and  a  seal-spear,  and 
let  him  accompany  the  men  in  quest  of  large  game. 
Lads  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  sometimes  will  be  found 
regular  members  of  a  whaling  crew. 

Like  the  Indians,  many  of  the  Eskimos  take  read 
ily  to  mechanical  pursuits,  the  necessity  for  making 
their  own  tools  and  weapons  having  sharpened  in 
them  the  constructive  and  inventive  faculties.  They 
have  also  a  decided  artistic  bent,  which  finds  expres 
sion  in  carving.  The  tools  they  used  for  mechanical 
and  artistic  work  were,  until  the  whites  introduced 
iron  and  steel  among  them,  made  chiefly  of  bone; 
and  of  this  are  still  made,  wholly  or  in  part,  many 
needles,  thimbles,  boxes,  weaving  devices,  fish-hooks, 
seal-nets,  harpoons,  boat-bailers,  crutches,  adzes,  mat- 


110  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

tocks,  picks,  shovels,  saws,  ice-scoops,  skin-scrapers, 
flasks,  pipes,  drumsticks,  and  implements  of  nearly 
all  other  kinds  employed  by  them.  Some  of  the  toys 
fashioned  for  the  children  are  very  ingenious.  One 
is  a  manikin,  with  arms  of  whalebone  so  arranged 
that  when  they  are  pressed  in  a  certain  way  he  beats 
a  drum  held  in  his  left  hand  with  a  stick  held  in 
his  right.  Another  is  a  man  in  a  kaiak,  or  canoe, 
which  is  worked  by  strings  of  cured  animal  sinew, 
so  that  he  will  make  a  stroke  with  his  paddle  and 
then  recover,  turning  his  head  from  side  to  side  with 
each  movement.  There  are  whirligigs,  teetotums, 
buzz-toys,  pebble-snappers,  and  similar  contrivances  in 
profusion.  Little  girls  among  the  Eskimos  do  not 
seem  to  care  much  for  dolls,  but  they  take  kindly  to 
skipping  rope,  and  "  play  house  "  by  arranging  sticks 
on  the  ground  as  if  for  the  boundaries  of  a  dwell 
ing  and  placing  one  of  their  number  inside;  the  game 
being  for  the  rest  to  try  to  invade  the  house  and 
for  the  housekeeper  to  catch  them  while  their  feet 
are  within  its  walls.  Children  of  both  sexes  also 
play  football  with  snowballs,  and  imitate  the  danc 
ing  of  their  elders. 

Tobacco  and  alcohol  were  among  the  novelties  to 
which  the  Eskimos  were  introduced  by  their  early 
white  visitors.  In  tobacco  they  have  a  discriminat 
ing  taste,  rejecting  the  cheaper  and  ranker  mixtures 
when  they  can  obtain  a  better  quality  even  at  a  con 
siderably  higher  price.  So  general  has  the  use  of  to 
bacco  become  among  them  that  unweaned  babes  are 
sometimes  seen  holding  it  in  their  mouths  and  swal 
lowing  the  juice  with  no  signs  of  nausea.  As  between 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN  111 

the  various  forms  of  alcohol,  the  Eskimo's  sole  thought 
is  to  get  that  which  will  most  readily  effect  intoxica 
tion.  Indeed,  whatever  will  accomplish  this  end  is 
acceptable,  whether  it  be  whiskey  or  stale  remnants 
of  patent  medicines  and  flavoring  extracts. 

With  the  Eskimos,  as  with  the  red  men,  the  chief 
hope  of  the  race  lies  in  the  training  of  the  children, 
the  adults  being  past  the  possibility  of  changing  a 
great  deal,  though  the  adult  Eskimo  is  far  more  sus 
ceptible  to  outside  influence  than  the  adult  Indian. 
The  Eskimo  children  are  naturally  bright.  Their  men 
tal  processes  are  stimulated,  moreover,  by  their  being 
thrown  upon  their  own  resources  at  a  pretty  early 
age,  at  least  as  to  taking  care  of  themselves  in  trad 
ing.  A  teacher  in  charge  of  one  of  the  Arctic  schools 
describes  an  illustrative  incident.  A  year  or  two  ago 
there  sailed  into  the  local  harbor,  just  before  the  close 
of  navigation,  a  whaling  schooner  manned  mainly  by 
Siberians.  One  evening  after  school  about  a  dozen 
pupils,  ranging  in  age  from  nine  to  fourteen,  launched 
a  canoe  and  went  out  to  the  ship,  where  they  fell  to 
bartering  with  the  sailors.  Before  they  came  ashore 
they  had  traded  away  nearly  everything  they  owned, 
some  of  them  disposing  thus  of  even  their  hats,  caps, 
coats,  suspenders,  shirts,  underwear,  and  pocket- 
knives.  On  their  return  to  the  school  they  were  over 
flowing  with  talk  about  their  visit,  and  exhibited  their 
trophies  with  much  pride,  for  they  had  driven  sharp 
bargains  and  brought  back  more  value  than  they  had 
let  go,  and  they  knew  it  without  their  teacher  tell 
ing  them. 

Recognizing  the  commercial  instinct  as  a  power- 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

ful  lever  for  civilization  if  well  directed,  and  glad 
to  encourage  its  cultivation  among  the  young,  several 
of  the  government  schools  are  using  it  as  the  basis 
of  their  scheme  of  instruction.  Arithmetic,  for  exam 
ple,  is  made  a  conspicuous  feature,  daily  drills  being 
given  in  mental  work  and  rapid  calculation,  and  large 
use  being  made  of  problems  in  which  the  familiar  com 
modities  figure,  so  that  the  children  will  recognize  the 
immediate  practical  bearing  of  everything  they  learn. 
Much  emphasis  is  laid  on  oral  English,  also,  in  which 
the  chief  difficulty  lies  not  in  teaching  the  children 
the  language,  but  in  overcoming  their  timidity  about 
attempting  to  speak  it. 

The  head  of  one  of  the  coast  schools,  a  year  or  two 
ago,  went  a  step  further  than  most  of  his  colleagues, 
and  introduced  a  modified  system  of  pupil  self-govern 
ment.  The  various  duties  involved  in  running  the 
school  he  distributed  among  a  series  of  offices,  and 
then  held  an  election  to  fill  these  offices.  There  was 
chosen  a  bell-ringer  whose  task  it  should  be  to  sound 
the  summons  for  the  children  for  every  session.  An 
other  functionary  elected  was  a  janitor  who  was  made 
responsible  for  the  tidiness  of  the  schoolhouse;  he  was 
to  appoint  daily  a  staff  of  sweepers,  and  supervise 
their  work  while  they  cleaned  the  floors,  dusted  the 
desks  and  windows,  and  set  the  furniture  in  the  right 
positions.  Another  was  a  librarian  into  whose  cus 
tody  was  put  all  the  books;  he  was  to  keep  a  writ 
ten  list  of  them,  with  memoranda  of  the  shelves  on 
which  they  belonged,  and  to  enter  the  titles  of  those 
lent  out  and  the  names  of  the  borrowers.  A  fourth 
was  a  stationer  whose  duty  was  to  take  care  of  the 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN  113 

pens  and  pencils,  paper  and  erasers,  and  attend  to  their 
circulation  when  needed.  A  fireman  was  charged 
with  the  building  of  the  fires,  and  the  study  of  the 
thermometer  to  make  sure  of  a  proper  temperature 
in  the  schoolroom;  chalk  and  ink  inspectors  doled 
out  those  necessaries  to  the  pupils  who  had  to  work 
with  them;  a  monitor  kept  a  roll-book  which  con 
tained  the  records  of  attendance,  absence,  and  tardi 
ness;  a  carpenter  had  the  care  of  the  tools,  and  was 
to  report  regularly  on  their  condition;  and  so  on. 
Above  all  these  was  placed  a  committee  who  kept 
an  eye  on  matters  generally,  imposing  fines  for  waste, 
carelessness,  and  other  shortcomings  serious  enough 
to  call  for  discipline. 

This  system,  strangely  enough,  had  its  origin  in 
a  school  so  remote  from  civilization  that  it  is  cut 
off  from  all  communication  with  the  outside  world, 
except  for  the  visit  of  a  government  ship  once  a  year 
in  the  summer.  Yet  the  children  seemed  to  take  to 
it  with  as  much  avidity  as  if  they  had  grown  up  in 
constant  touch  with  the  town-meeting  and  the  popular 
primary.  Under  the  encouragement  of  the  Commis 
sioner  of  Education,  who  is  deeply  interested  in  the 
experiment,  it  is  spreading  to  the  other  schools  all 
over  Alaska. 

Practical  applications  accompany  all  instruction. 
The  advanced  arithmetic  classes,  for  instance,  are  put 
through  a  course  in  making  out  bills  for  the  'build 
ing  materials  entering  into  the  construction  of  a 
schoolhouse.  The  lumber,  nails,  paper,  shingles,  and 
windows  are  figured  at  the  prices  prevailing  in  the 
larger  American  markets,  and  the  children  have  these 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

concrete  examples  to  work  on  instead  of  the  abstrac 
tions  usually  printed  in  the  text-books.  Then  the  food 
supply  for  a  year  is  estimated  and  billed  for  purchase 
in  the  same  way.  A  special  touch  of  realism  is  given 
to  the  business  by  reckoning  payments  in  furs  and 
whalebone,  supposed  to  be  turned  over  in  barter  at 
the  valuations  commonly  set  upon  these  articles  in 
the  trade  of  the  neighborhood.  Lately  an  effort  has 
been  made  to  extend  the  influence  of  the  schools,  and 
further  assure  the  natives  of  their  usefulness,  by 
inviting  the  older  people  to  bring  in  their  hides,  ivory, 
etc.,  which  they  are  going  to  send  away  to  exchange 
for  subsistence  stores  for  their  families.  Their  wares 
can  thus  be  correctly  counted  and  weighed,  and  packed 
and  marked  in  a  businesslike  way  for  shipment,  the 
invoices  being  made  out  just  as  in  a  city  warehouse, 
and  the  commodities  obtained  in  exchange  being  sent 
back  to  the  shipper  addressed  in  his  own  name.  A 
surprising  development,  by  the  way,  of  the  govern 
ment's  effort  to  provide  better  markets  for  the  native 
products  has  been  brought  about  by  the  extension 
of  the  parcel-post  to  this  far-away  region.  In  the 
old  times,  the  natives  were  so  often  obliged  to  deal 
with  the  local  traders  exclusively  that  they  had  to 
be  content  with  insignificant  prices  and  were  con 
stantly  in  debt.  But  now  they  can  send  their  furs 
and  ivory  through  the  mails  to  responsible  commis 
sion  merchants  in  Seattle,  with  the  result  that  in  some 
cases  they  command  prices  seventeen  times  as  high 
as  those  they  obtained  before  for  goods  of  the  same 
grade. 

In  the  Aleutian  Islands,  which  stretch  in  a  curved 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN    115 

line  from  the  toe  of  the  Alaska  Peninsula  well  over 
the  North  Pacific  Ocean  toward  the  coast  of  Kam 
chatka,  are  found  a  group  of  natives  who  differ  in 
some  particulars  from  the  Eskimos,  yet  who  are  too 
closely  related  to  them  for  distinction  in  the  popular 
mind.  Such  differences  as  are  most  observable  are 
supposed  to  be  due  to  their  isolation  from  the  main 
body  of  their  people,  and  their  association  with  the 
Russian  adventurers  who  came  in  about  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century  and  conquered  them.  Thus 
Russian  habits,  and  words  from  the  Russian  language, 
were  in  course  of  time  adopted  by  the  Aleuts  and 
woven  in  with  their  own,  till  there  was  little  of  the 
unadulterated  native  life  left.  Indeed,  the  name 
Aleut,  which  the  islanders  have  now  firmly  fixed  upon 
them,  was  not  theirs  originally :  they  used  to  call  them 
selves  Unungan.  Whence  they  obtained  their  present 
designation  has  long  been  a  subject  of  dispute.  At 
one  period  it  was  assumed  to  have  been  derived  from 
a  Russian  word  signifying  a  bold  rock,  and  to  have 
referred  to  a  geologic  feature  of  some  of  the  islands; 
but  most  of  the  scientists  I  have  heard  discuss  the 
question  recently  think  that  the  Russian  discoverers, 
mistaking  these  islanders  for  another  group  in  whose 
tongue  "  aliat  "  means  "  island,"  applied  to  them  a  cor 
rupted  form  of  this  term,  and  thus  Aliat,  Aliut,  or 
Aleut  was  fastened  to  them,  just  as  a  geographical 
error  of  Columbus  when  he  discovered  the  West  In 
dies  was  perpetuated  in  the  name  "  Indian,"  by  whicli 
the  aboriginal  race  in  the  body  of  our  continent  is 
known. 

The  Aleuts  have  had  a  history  more  tragic  in  some 


116  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

of  its  aspects,  though  less  picturesque,  than  the  his 
tory  of  the  red  man  in  the  United  States.  Nature  had 
been  far  from  kind  to  them  before  they  ever  saw  the 
face  of  a  white  man;  and  they  appear  to  have  been 
treated  with  such  cruelty  by  the  Russian  traders  who 
first  settled  among  them  that,  after  some  years  of  this 
contact,  their  numbers  had  dwindled  to  less  than  one- 
tenth  of  what  they  were  before  the  discovery.  The 
abuses  finally  reached  a  point  where  the  Russian  gov 
ernment,  prompted  partly  by  a  desire  to  establish  a 
commercial  monopoly,  and  partly,  doubtless,  by  hu 
manity,  interfered  and  instituted  measures  for  regu 
lating  the  intercourse  beween  the  two  races.  About 
this  time,  also,  the  missionaries  began  work,  with  the 
result  of  greatly  improving  the  condition  of  the 
Aleuts,  though  not  all  the  evils  were  eliminated.  The 
population  of  the  islands  has  increased  and  decreased 
by  turns  since  these  ameliorating  influences  became 
operative,  epidemic  diseases  and  a  craving  for  intoxi 
cants  having  played  no  insignificant  part  in  its  de 
clines.  It  is  now  about  eleven  hundred. 

A  people  naturally  of  high  spirit,  the  Aleuts  were 
disposed  to  hold  their  ground  against  the  first  advance 
of  the  Russians;  but,  with  only  their  home-made  darts 
to  oppose  to  European  firearms,  their  resistance  was 
a  pitiful  failure,  and  the  invaders  soon  reduced  them 
to  a  condition  of  virtual  slavery.  From  that  day  all 
their  mettle  seems  to  have  gone  out  of  them;  they  are 
quiet  and  teachable,  but  their  docility  is  that  of  con 
scious  and  hopeless  weakness.  They  continue  at  their 
old  occupations  of  seal  and  otter  hunting;  and  it  must 
regretfully  be  admitted  that  for  a  number  of  years 


ALASKAN    TOTEM    POLE. 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN    117 

after  the  islands  had  passed  under  the  jurisdiction 
of  the  United  States,  the  class  of  Americans  who  vis 
ited  them  carried  in  quite  as  many  of  the  vices  as 
of  the  virtues  of  Caucasian  civilization,  and  in  some 
instances  threatened  to  parallel  the  bad  record  of  their 
foreign  predecessors. 

Besides  the  Eskimos  and  the  Aleuts,  we  find  in 
Alaska  the  Athapascans,  who  live  in  the  Yukon  Val 
ley  and  the  smaller  valleys  that  run  into  it.  They  are 
believed  to  be  of  Asiatic  origin,  but  are  so  closely 
related  in  their  habits  to  the  red  men  of  the  United 
States  proper  as  to  call  for  only  passing  mention  here. 
In  southeastern  Alaska,  also,  there  are  the  Thlingits, 
who  resemble  the  Athapascans  except  in  language,  and 
who  have  been  so  long  in  constant  contact  with  the 
whites  as  to  have  lost  a  great  many  of  their  original 
characteristics  and  adopted  the  main  features  of  our 
mode  of  living.  They  are  a  fine  people,  and  it  is 
gratifying  to  learn  that  their  decline  in  numbers,  which 
for  seventy  years  under  foreign  domination  proceeded 
at  an  appalling  rate,  appears  to  have  been  checked. 

What  can  be  done  with  natives  of  this  sort  is  dem 
onstrated  by  the  experience  of  the  Rev.  William  Dun 
can,  who  organized  the  Metlakatla  colony  which  now 
has  its  home  on  Annette  Island,  near  the  southern 
most  extremity  of  the  Alaska  coast-line.  Here  is  a 
community  of  between  six  and  seven  hundred  souls, 
in  which  the  manufacturing  of  commercial  lumber  and 
the  canning  of  seafood,  together  with  several  minor 
industries  and  arts,  are  carried  on  with  excellent  ef 
fect.  It  must  be  borne  in  mind,  however,  in  estimating 
the  success  of  this  enterprise,  that  one  of  its  chief 


119  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

factors  has  been  the  barring  of  Annette  Island  from 
invasion  by  white  miners.  About  fifteen  years  ago, 
some  prospectors  believed  that  they  had  discovered 
traces  of  valuable  mineral  deposits  there,  and  tried 
to  obtain  permission  from  the  United  States  Govern 
ment  to  file  claims  and  explore  the  leads;  but  Mr.  Dun 
can  visited  Washington,  and,  presenting  his  protest 
in  person  and  enlisting  the  aid  of  many  influential 
men  and  women,  managed  to  stave  off  what  he  re 
garded  as  the  evil  day  for  Metlakatla.  Although  the 
mining  parties  were  excluded  for  the  time  being,  it 
is  inevitable  that,  if  their  belief  in  the  mineral  wealth 
of  the  island  is  well  founded,  they  will  renew  their 
efforts  sooner  or  later,  and  will  win  the  right  to  enter 
and  develop  mines.  Then  will  come  the  real  test 
of  the  hold  Mr.  Duncan's  teachings  have  upon  his  col 
ony  of  natives.  If  their  characters  have  been  suf 
ficiently  strengthened  to  withstand  the  influences  of 
compulsory  association  with  the  white  element  which 
always  follows  in  the  wake  of  a  new  mining  venture, 
his  work  must  be  esteemed  a  triumph  indeed,  and 
the  principle  of  prolonged  seclusion  on  which  it  has 
rested  will  gain  strength  accordingly.  Quite  apart 
from  its  missionary  appeal,  the  Metlakatla  experiment 
has  been,  and  will  be,  a  most  interesting  sociological 
study. 

The  climate  of  a  large  part  of  Alaska  is  accountable 
for  the  slowness  of  its  general  development.  In  the 
regions  bordering  on  the  Arctic  Ocean  and  Bering  Sea, 
a  fair  midwinter  temperature  is  40  degrees  below  zero, 
and  in  spots  it  has  fallen  to  55°;  while  in  the  interior 
it  has  been  known  to  go  as  low  as  80°.  When  we 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN  119 

consider  what  this  fierce  cold  means  in  connection 
with  six  months  of  only  briefly  interrupted  darkness, 
and  that  dependence  for  all  communication  with  the 
outside  world  must  be  on  ships  which  take  their 
chances  in  an  ice-laden  sea,  and  on  dog-sled  trains  at 
very  irregular  intervals,  we  can  begin  to  appreciate  the 
courage  and  fortitude  of  the  pioneers  of  civilization  in 
that  part  of  the  world. 

More  credit  than  is  commonly  accorded  is  due  to 
the  reindeer  policy  which  the  late  Dr.  Sheldon  Jack 
son  induced  the  United  States  Government  to  adopt 
in  Alaska.  It  came  about  through  the  discovery,  in 
1890,  of  some  Eskimo  villages  where  a  bad  fishing 
season  had  reduced  the  inhabitants  to  the  verge  of 
starvation.  Yet  in  northeastern  Asia,  only  a  few 
hundred  miles  away  and  subject  to  similar  natural 
conditions,  a  large  population  were  subsisting  in  com 
parative  comfort  by  the  use  of  the  domesticated  rein 
deer;  for  these  animals,  while  living,  furnished  them 
with  milk  and  pulled  their  sledges  about,  and,  when 
killed,  supplied  nutritious  meat,  and  hides  which  could 
be  utilized  for  clothing,  bedding,  and  wall  and  room 
coverings  for  their  houses.  The  thought  thereupon 
suggested  itself  to  Dr.  Jackson  that  if  a  lot  of  tame 
reindeer  could  be  imported,  and  the  Eskimos  taught 
how  to  take  care  of  them,  a  great  problem  might  be 
solved  almost  automatically.  It  took  Congress  some 
years  to  assimilate  this  idea  sufficiently  to  vote  the 
money  needed,  but  when  it  came  to  grasp  the  impor 
tance  of  the  proposition  it  responded  with  a  series 
of  annual  appropriations  ranging  from  $5,000  to 
$25,000,  and  the  work  was  launched. 


120  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

The  difficulties  besetting  a  commerce  in  reindeer 
carried  on  between  the  Asiatic  and  American  coasts 
were  not  confined  to  the  handling  of  the  animals  with 
the  indifferent  equipment  at  command,  or  the  perils 
of  their  transportation  in  vessels  never  designed  for 
such  purposes,  but  included  the  adjustment  of  satis 
factory  relations  between  the  government  and  the 
missionary  societies  maintaining  stations  in  Alaska. 
Theoretically,  the  government  has  no  administrative 
connection  with  religious  bodies  of  any  name;  but 
actually,  in  its  undertakings  in  uncivilized  regions, 
it  has  to  depend  a  great  deal  on  their  friendly  coop 
eration.  In  the  reindeer  enterprise  this  was  markedly 
the  case.  The  government  fixed  on  a  plan  for  dis 
tributing  the  animals,  which  began  with  the  loan  of 
herds,  embracing  each  twenty-five  males  and  seventy- 
five  females,  to  mission  stations  for  five-year  periods, 
a  station  thus  favored  entering  into  obligation  to 
educate  a  certain  number  of  native  apprentices  in 
herdsmanship.  At  the  end  of  the  contract  period  the 
mission  was  to  return  to-  the  government  twenty-five 
male  and  seventy-five  female  deer  of  a  younger  gen 
eration,  retaining  whatever  of  the  parent  stock  sur 
vived,  and  also  the  rest  of  the  increase. 

As  the  government  schools  multiplied  through  the 
wilder  parts  of  the  territory,  they  gradually  took  over 
the  reindeer  business  from  the  missionaries,  till  now 
only  a  few  of  the  mission  stations  retain  their  con 
nection  with  it.  The  work  has  been  steadily  made 
more  and  more  systematic.  Under  regulations  ap 
proved  by  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior  in  1907,  an 
apprentice  is  allowed  four  years  to  learn  his  trade; 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN 

if  he  does  well,  he  receives  at  the  close  of  his  first 
year  six  animals  for  his  own,  the  next  year  eight, 
and  the  last  two  years  ten  each.  Meanwhile,  he  is 
encouraged  to  go  into  freighting  with  his  sled-deer, 
and  by  permission  of  his  Superintendent  he  may  kill 
his  surplus  stock  from  time  to  time  and  sell  the  meat 
and  hides  for  his  personal  profit.  On  his  graduation 
he  becomes  a  full-fledged  and  independent  herder, 
with  his  earnings  for  his  capital,  his  accumulated  deer 
for  his  first  outfit,  and  some  knowledge  of  business 
methods  gained  from  his  experience  in  transporting 
mails,  passengers,  and  goods.  He  is  still  required, 
however,  to  conform  to  the  rules  of  the  reindeer  serv 
ice,  which  include  a  strict  prohibition  upon  the  sale 
of  any  female  except  to  the  government  or  to  some 
other  native  designated  by  the  government.  The  pur 
pose  of  this  restriction  is  to  confine  the  benefits  of 
the  reindeer  business  to  the  people  for  whose  sake 
Jthe  government  embarked  in  it,  and  to  prevent  its  drift 
ing  into  the  hands  of  the  whites  till  the  natives  are 
everywhere  well  supplied  and  well  instructed  and  the 
industry  has  become  self-supporting. 

The  records  show  that  the  total  number  of  reindeer 
in  Alaska  doubles  every  four  years.  If  this  rate  of 
increase  continues,  there  should  be  150,000  head  in 
the  territory  by  1920.  Persons  familiar  with  this 
region  have  figured  out  that  there  is  enough  land 
suitable  for  grazing,  but  fit  for  little  else,  to  support 
four  million  deer,  of  which  it  would  be  safe  to  slaugh 
ter  about  one  million  every  year,  and  ship  the  meat 
to  the  states;  and  not  a  few  economic  experts  are 
considering  the  possibility  that  Alaskan  reindeer- 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

farming,  which  started  as  a  pure  benevolence,  may 
yet  help  solve  the  riddle  of  a  food  supply  for  the 
children  and  grandchildren  of  our  generation,  not 
merely  in  the  Arctic  zone  but  everywhere  in  the 
country. 

When  the  Russians  came  into  Alaska,  a  good  many 
unions  were  formed  between  Russian  men  and  native 
women,  and  several  of  their  mixed-blood  descendants 
have  risen  to  positions  of  prominence  in  their  re 
spective  communities.  The  Russian  law  of  the 
ff  eemlia,"  which  attaches  the  subject  of  the  Czar  to 
the  soil  of  his  domicile,  came  into  strange  operation 
here;  for  an  employee  of  a  Russian  trading  company, 
after  serving  his  contract  term  in  Alaska,  was  obliged 
to  return  to  his  home  in  the  old  country,  whereas  the 
woman  who  had  cast  her  lot  with  him,  no  matter 
how  fond  they  might  be  of  each  other  or  how  faith 
ful  to  their  bond,  had  to  stay  in  Alaska,  because  that 
was  her  home,  and  she  could  not  be  taken  away  from 
it,  even  to  follow  her  partner.  The  fact,  however, 
that  such  a  separation  was  a  matter  of  law  and  not 
of  inclination,  gave  to  the  unions  of  whites  and  na 
tives,  entered  into  and  maintained  in  good  faith  on 
both  sides,  the  moral  effect  of  marriage  without  its 
sacramental  or  statutory  liabilities,  so  that  no  social 
ignominy  attached  to  the  parties  where  the  whites  and 
their  domestic  customs  were  dominant.  The  anom 
alous  situation  was  changed  when  the  United  States 
took  possession  of  Alaska,  as  the  treaty  of  cession 
made  it  possible  for  any  Russian  subject  resident 
there,  should  he  so  desire,  to  remain  and  become  an 
American  citizen;  and  the  formal  sanction  of  the  law 


ABORIGINES  WHO  ARE  NOT  RED  MEN 

was  extended  to  any  union  he  might  have  formed  with 
a  native  woman. 

The  Alaska  natives  number  only  about  28,000,  less 
than  one-tenth  the  Indian  population  of  the  United 
States.  Thus  far  their  case  has  presented  few  of  the 
problems  which  have  vexed  the  government  for  so 
many  years  in  regard  to  the  Indians.  The  situation 
in  the  territory  more  resembles  that  which  grew  out 
of  our  acquisition  of  the  Philippine  Islands  from 
Spain.  Alaska  is  separated  by  a  considerable  space 
from  the  main  body  of  our  republic.  Large  parts 
of  it  are  still  unknown  except  to  scientific  explorers, 
government  officers,  adventurers,  and  parties  drawn 
thither  for  purposes  of  trade.  The  aborigines  are  of 
various  degrees  of  social  backwardness,  and  so  dis 
tributed  that  they  could  array  no  force  at  any  given 
point  to  obstruct  the  advance  of  the  white  race  and 
its  civilization.  The  land  question  there  amounts  to 
little,  since  the  climate  constricts  agriculture  within 
very  close  bounds,  and  only  the  minerals,  the  fur  in 
dustry,  and  the  fisheries  offer  any  attraction  to  colo 
nists  from  without.  Moreover,  starting  with  the  idea 
that  the  country  was  purchased  outright  from  its 
former  owner,  our  government  has  never  resorted  to 
treaty-making  with  the  native  occupants,  and  has  had 
no  such  technical  compunctions  to  wrestle  with  in 
taking  possession  of  whatever  it  wished,  as  it  had 
when  it  helped  itself  to  the  property  of  the  red  men 
west  of  the  Mississippi.  It  is  safe  to  predict  that 
there  will  never  be  any  reservations  in  Alaska  where 
the  natives  will  be  herded  and  fed  and  pauperized,  or 
any  allotment  of  farms  with  the  notion  of  civilizing 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

them  through  the  tillage  of  the  soil.  But  one  day — 
and  let  the  younger  generation  who  read  this  prophecy 
mark  it  for  future  reference — there  will  come  a  clash 
between  the  natives  and  the  whites  over  the  fisheries. 
When  the  full  value  of  these  is  realized,  the  whites 
will  insist  on  regulating  them  by  law;  and  the  na 
tives,  owing  to  their  lack  of  acquaintance  with  such 
methods,  will  fail  to  get  their  fair  share  of  the  privi 
leges  dispensed  by  lease,  license,  or  otherwise.  They 
will  undergo  a  deal  of  trouble  from  punishment  as 
poachers,  just  as  has  happened  on  the  coasts  farther 
south,  and  in  the  forests  of  the  interior  where  rigid 
game  laws  have  superseded  the  old  practice  of  unre 
stricted  killing  of  wild  animals  for  food. 


VI 


THE  RED   MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND 
LEARNER 


In  all  cases  where  it  is  possible  we  hope  to  keep  for  the 
Indian  and  for  us  what  was  best  in  his  old  culture.  The  In 
dians  themselves  must  be  used  in  such  education;  many  of  their 
old  men  can  speak  as  sincerely,  as  fervently,  and  as  eloquently 
of  duty  as  any  white  teacher,  and  these  old  men  are  the  very 
teachers  best  fitted  to  perpetuate  the  Indian  poetry  and  music. 
The  effort  should  be  to  develop  the  existing  art — whether  in 
silver-making,  pottery-making,  blanket  and  basket-weaving,  or 
lace-knitting — and  not  to  replace  it  by  servile  and  mechanical 
copying.  This  is  only  to  apply  to  the  Indian  a  principle  which 
ought  to  be  recognized  among  all  our  people ;  a  great  art  must 
be  living,  must  spring  from  the  soul  of  the  people;  if  it 
represents  merely  a  copying,  an  imitation,  and  if  it  is  confined 
to  a  small  caste,  it  cannot  be  great.  .  .  . 

The  majority  must  change  gradually,  and  it  will  take  genera 
tions  to  make  the  change  complete.  Help  them  to  make  it  in 
such  fashion  that  when  the  change  is  accomplished  we  shall  find 
that  the  original  and  valuable  elements  in  the  Indian  culture 
have  been  retained,  so  that  the  new  citizens  come  with  full 
hands  into  the  great  field  of  American  life,  and  contribute  to 
that  life  something  of  marked  value  to  all  of  us,  something 
which  it  would  be  a  misfortune  to  all  of  us  to  have  destroyed. — 
THEODORE  ROOSEVELT,  in  The  Outlook. 


VI 

THE  RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER 

THE  Caucasian  race  is  convinced  that  it  is  the 
greatest  on  earth,  and  with  reason.  But  some 
of  us  go  a  step  further,  and  assume  that  our 
superiority  to  the  other  races  means  that  we  can  learn 
nothing  from  them.  This  is  a  sad  mistake,  and  no 
where  worse  than  when  we  contrast  ourselves  with 
the  American  aborigines.  Though  we  can  teach  them 
an  immense  amount  about  social  organization,  econ 
omy  and  efficiency  in  production,  the  preservation 
of  health  and  the  promotion  of  comfort,  they  in  their 
turn  can  teach  us  many  things  by  example. 

Take,  for  instance,  the  matter  of  mental  poise.  The 
red  man  has  a  mind  not  proof  against  excitement,  as 
is  shown  by  some  of  his  ceremonial  performances  in 
which  he  works  it  into  a  frenzy.  These  occasions, 
however,  are  sporadic.  In  his  regular  daily  inter 
course  the  Indian  is  calm,  thoughtful,  deliberate,  con 
temptuous  of  turbulence  in  others.  Speaking  only 
when  he  has  something  to  say,  he  speaks  then  with 
a  candor  which  is  refreshing,  albeit  startling  at  times. 
When  one  Indian  thinks  another  a  liar  or  a  thief, 
he  says  so;  it  does  not  occur  to  him  to  hunt  through 
his  limited  vocabulary  for  a  euphemism  which  will 
convey  an  impression  of  his  opinion  without  stating 

127 


128  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

it  outright.  The  Indian  accused  receives  the  charge 
in  a  corresponding  spirit.  If  he  is  innocent,  he  says 
so,  and  perhaps  cites  some  incident  in  proof,  but 
he  does  not  feel  called  upon  to  knock  the  accuser  down. 
The  white  man's  quick  and  violent  resentment  in  such 
a  case  springs  from  the  theory  that  his  honor  is  his 
most  precious  possession,  which  he  can  protect  only 
by  punishing  instantly  any  slur  cast  upon  it.  And  yet 
the  logic  of  the  argument  is  with  the  Indian,  who  rea 
sons  that  the  blow  does  not  establish  the  falseness  of 
the  statement  which  called  it  forth;  and  he  marvels 
especially  when  he  sees  a  white  man  exploding  with 
wrath  over  an  imputation  that  one  of  his  careless  re 
marks  is  untrue,  yet  smirking  with  gratified  vanity 
at  a  hint  that  he  has  committed  offences  against  the 
moral  law  which  by  comparison  make  an  indiscretion 
of  the  lips  seem  trivial  indeed. 

Besides,  whoever  is  well  acquainted  with  the  old- 
fashioned  Indian  knows  that  he  is  as  jealous  of  his 
honor  as  the  most  high-minded  Caucasian.  If  he 
gives  you  his  word  that  he  will  do  a  thing,  you  may 
safely  stake  your  all  on  his  fulfilment  of  his  prom 
ise.  Repeatedly  I  have  lent  an  Indian  money  in  some 
emergency,  not  seen  him  again  for  years,  and  then 
had  him  hunt  me  up  to  lay  before  me  the  exact  amount, 
as  if  the  loan  had  been  made  an  hour  before.  The 
court  records  of  the  West  teem  with  instances  where 
Indians  indicted  for  the  most  serious  crimes  have  been 
allowed  to  go  their  way  without  a  bond,  on  prom 
ising  to  appear  on  a  given  date  for  trial;  and  I  have 
yet  to  hear  of  one  thus  privileged  who  has  broken 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  129 

his  pledge.  That  is  the  sort  of  honor  which  does 
not  need  bloodshed  to  vindicate  it. 

The  calmness  of  the  Indian  appears  nowhere  to 
better  advantage  than  in  his  treatment  of  his  chil 
dren.  He  does  not  find  it  necessary  to  storm  at  them 
in  order  to  assert  his  authority.  They  are  free  to 
do  pretty  nearly  anything  they  wish,  and  perhaps  for 
that  reason  they  are  about  as  well-behaved  as  any  in 
the  world,  for  there  is  nothing  in  their  discipline  to 
arouse  in  them  a  spirit  of  resistance.  And  the  in 
teresting  fact  is  plain  to  all  students  of  the  Indian 
that  as  these  children  grow  up  they  Have  a  reverence 
for  their  elders  which  is  seldom  found  nowadays 
among  ours.  It  might  not  be  practicable  for  us  to 
imitate  in  its  extremes  the  aboriginal  model  of  fam 
ily  training;  but  the  self-control  shown  by  the  In 
dian  parent  in  his  avoidance  of  noisy  rebukes  and 
intemperate  forms  of  expression,  and  his  general  m- 
disposition  to  carp  on  petty  annoyances,  suggest  im 
provements  in  our  manners  which  we  may  profitably 
lay  to  heart. 

In  spite  of  his  candor  of  speech,  the  red  man  dis 
plays  a  considerateness  in  some  of  his  relations  which 
is  worthy  of  the  white  man's  attention.  Life  in  a 
tepee  presents  sundry  phases  which  we  who  are  ac 
customed  to  roomy  houses  would  find  difficult.  The 
occupants  are  huddled  together  all  the  time  in  a  small 
space,  with  no  opportunity  for  retirement  and  self- 
communion.  Not  only  must  they  avoid  quarreling, 
but  every  one  must  respect  the  preference  of  every 
other  to  be  alone  now  and  then.  The  desired  isola 
tion  is  accomplished  by  a  sign  from  the  person  who 


130  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

wishes  to  seclude  himself,  to  which  the  family  re 
spond  by  absolutely  ignoring  his  presence  in  the  midst 
of  them,  and  with  such  delicacy  that  it  is  as  if  he 
had  suddenly  become  invisible.  This  continues  till 
he  gives  a  counter-sign,  after  which  he  is  drawn 
once  more  into  the  common  current.  Self-effacement, 
with  complete  absorption  in  one's  own  meditations  in 
disregard  of  the  activities  of  all  around  one,  is  an  art 
in  which  the  Indians  of  the  old  order  were  trained, 
just  as  our  youth  are  taught  to  commit  their  lessons 
to  memory  in  a  buzzing  schoolroom,  or  to  work  in 
telligently  in  a  shop  where  rattling  machinery  is  in 
full  motion  on  every  side. 

Then,  there  is  the  Indian's  liking  for  the  simple 
life.  It  would  not  be  wise,  probably,  for  us  to  carry 
our  emulation  of  it  into  such  details  as  his  dietary 
and  his  style  of  habitation;  but  we  can,  with  good  ef 
fect,  cultivate  its  spirit  and  enjoy  its  atmosphere.  We 
can  pass  as  much  of  our  time  as  possible  in  the  open 
air,  including  the  sleeping  hours;  we  can  spread  our 
tables  with  plain  and  healthful  foods  instead  of  heap 
ing  them  with  goads  for  the  palate;  and  we  can  sur 
round  ourselves  in  our  homes  with  only  the  things  we 
really  want,  dismissing  the  worry  of  caring  for  a 
thousand  things  that  we  would  rather  be  without,  but 
with  which  we  feel  obliged  to  load  ourselves  because 
our  neighbors  have  them. 

With  his  patience  and  his  indifference  to  hardship 
the  red  man  has  often  surprised  me.  When  we  see 
him  relinquishing  a  white  man's  job  at  which  he  has 
been  receiving  good  wages,  because  he  wishes  to  at 
tend  a  tribal  festival,  we  are  too  ready  to  conclude 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  1311 

that  he  is  vagrant-minded,  fickle,  unsteady.  But  when 
we  watch  him  on  a  hunt  in  his  own  wilds,  following1 
the  half-obliterated  tracks  of  an  elk  over  rolling  coun 
try,  or  trailing  a  fugitive  criminal  through  moun 
tain  labyrinths,  we  realize  that  such  criticism  is 
unjustly  sweeping.  Indian  blanket- weavers,  basket- 
makers,  potters,  silversmiths,  all  delve  at  their  trades 
with  a  persistence  which  would  do  credit  to  artisans 
of  any  blood,  and  often  their  products  represent  not 
only  long-continued  toil,  but  a  brave  struggle  with 
natural  obstacles. 

A  few  years  ago  I  made  a  flying  visit  to  an  Indian 
station  in  the  heart  of  Arizona,  on  my  way  to  meet 
a  Superintendent  at  a  point  perhaps  seventy  miles  to 
the  northward,  measured  in  a  bee-line  across  a  prac 
tically  trackless  desert.  To  my  dismay  I  found  await 
ing  me  a  letter  from  the  Superintendent  proposing  a 
change  of  plan,  and  making  it  necessary  for  me  to> 
communicate  with  him  before  nine  o'clock  the  next 
morning.  There  was  no  telegraph  line  which  could 
carry  him  a  message,  and  the  mail  would  take  three 
or  four  days  on  account  of  the  circuitous  route  it 
would  have  to  travel.  Evening  was  approaching.  I 
sent  for  a  Navajo  Indian  who  was  reputed  an  intel 
ligent  fellow,  and  who  knew  enough  English  to  under 
stand  me  without  an  interpreter.  Upon  him  I  im 
pressed  vigorously  the  importance  of  my  business, 
and  handed  him  a  written  communication  which  he 
was  to  deliver  to  the  Superintendent  before  the  sun 
had  risen  to  a  specified  point  in  the  heavens.  It  was 
like  giving  Lieutenant  Rowan  the  message  to  Garcia: 
my  Navajo  made  no  comments  and  asked  no  ques- 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

tions,  but  went  to  his  hogan  for  his  wife,  a  little  sack 
of  provender,  and  two  ponies.  I  afterward  learned 
from  the  Superintendent  that  my  note  was  delivered 
to  him  at  breakfast  on  the  morning  after  it  was  writ 
ten.  I  never  saw  my  messenger  again  to  get  the 
story  of  his  night  ride;  but  probably  my  readers  will 
agree  with  me  that  there  is  nothing  slothful  about 
a  man  of  any  race  who  will  perform  an  errand  like 
that  as  if  it  were  a  mere  matter  of  course. 

When  we  come  to  the  domain  of  aesthetics,  the  In 
dian  can  give  us  a  broad  hint.  It  is  true  that  he  paints 
his  face  and  crowns  his  head  with  feathers,  and  wears 
bead  necklaces  and  gorgeous  blankets — a  scheme  of 
adornment  which,  in  spite  of  his  clever  knack  of  com 
bining  colors,  bears  the  stamp  of  barbarism  and  sub 
jects  him  to  the  ridicule  of  superficial  critics;  but  at 
least  his  costumes  have  the  merit  of  individuality. 
Our  people  dress  as  if  they  were  all  cut  out  of  the 
same  piece.  The  long-tail  coat  may  suit  one  man's 
appearance  and  make  another  hideous;  yet  if  the  long- 
coat  is  decreed  by  fashion,  both  wear  it.  Although 
our  women  allow  themselves  more  latitude  in  minor 
details,  they,  too,  in  the  main,  make  a  fetish  of  con 
formity.  The  world  might  not  be  any  better  place, 
but  certainly  it  would  be  a  prettier  one,  if  every  hu 
man  being  wore  that  which  best  became  him  or  repre 
sented  his  individual  taste,  instead  of  striving  to  escape 
as  far  as  possible  from  the  exercise  of  any  independ 
ent  private  judgment  in  attire. 

Now,  what  have  we  to  teach  the  red  man?  And 
how? 

The  late  Bishop  Hare  once  said  to  me  that  if  he 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  133 

had  the  appointment  of  responsible  field  functionaries 
in  the  Indian  Service,  and  were  compelled  to  choose 
between  a  man  who  was  dishonest  in  handling  gov 
ernment  property  but  clean  and  scrupulous  in  his  home, 
and  one  who  was  straight  in  business  matters  but 
loose  in  his  private  morals,  he  would  prefer  the  former 
to  the  latter.  The  government,  the  Bishop  thought, 
could  endure  the  loss  of  its  money  better  than  the 
Indians  could  afford  to  have  a  vicious  example  set 
them  by  a  custodian  to  whom  they  looked  for  guid 
ance.  Fortunately,  we  are  not  reduced  to  such  an 
alternative  in  recruiting  the  Indian  Service.  At  the 
time  the  Bishop  spoke,  the  Service  was  largely  in  the 
hands  of  professional  politicians,  not  a  few  of  whom 
drew  a  sharp  line  of  distinction  between  their  public 
and  their  domestic  consciences;  to-day  it  contains  a 
small  army  of  men  who  manage  extensive  inter 
ests  without  the  misappropriation  of  a  penny,  and 
who  are  model  husbands  and  fathers.  It  is  to  be  re 
gretted,  however,  that  the  isolation  of  their  stations, 
and  the  lack  of  adequate  schools  near  at  hand,  require 
that  so  many  send  their  children  away  to  be  edu 
cated,  at  the  very  age  when  a  child's  part  in  the 
home  life  counts  for  something;  and  thus  the  Indians 
lose  the  advantage  of  an  example  of  wholesome  dis 
cipline  among  the  young  people  in  the  families  of 
their  Superintendents  and  teachers. 

Much  effort  will  have  to  be  expended  on  teaching 
the  Indian  the  real  meaning  of  some  of  the  good  gifts 
we  are  offering  him.  Like  all  primitive  humankind, 
he  finds  it  difficult  to  reason  from  the  concrete  to 
the  abstract.  He  is  keen  enough  in  observing  phe- 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

nomena,  but  his  mind,  untrained  in  the  art  of  work 
ing  back  from  visible  effects  to  their  hidden  causes, 
or  forward  to  their  remoter  resultants,  dismisses  all 
these  relations  as  enveloped  in  impenetrable  mystery. 
Take  the  matter  of  education  as  an  illustration.  He 
sees  white  men  everywhere  setting  a  high  value  on  it, 
and  often  willing  to  make  great  sacrifices  to  obtain 
it.  Why?  Because,  one  tells  him,  it  adds  vastly  to 
the  enjoyment  of  life.  Another  assures  him  that  the 
educated  man  prospers  better  in  a  worldly  way  than 
the  uneducated  man.  How,  then,  he  inquires,  can  he 
get  this  education,  which  brings  to  others  so  much 
happiness  and  wealth?  The  school  is  pointed  out  to 
him  as  its  dispenser.  So  the  Indian  who  is  too  old 
to  go  to  school  himself  is  reconciled  to  sending  his 
boy  and  girl.  They  acquire  a  smattering  of  several 
branches  of  knowledge,  and  then  the  adults  of  their 
tribe  watch  to  see  them  enter  upon  lives  of  luxury. 
It  does  not  occur  to  the  minds  of  the  watchers  that 
the  schooling  is  only  the  preparation  of  the  intel 
lectual  soil,  and  that  whatever  grows  out  of  it  must 
come  through  an  exercise  of  ingenuity  and  industry, 
and  an  assumption  of  responsibility,  far  more  strenu 
ous  than  anything  found  in  the  school.  They  have 
simply  confounded  symbol  with  substance. 

The  same  is  true  of  the  religious  ideal.  That  the 
Indian  has  religious  concepts  and  leanings  of  his  own, 
we  have  already  noted.  But  religion,  with  him,  deals 
so  much  with  vagaries  of  divine  favor  and  disfavor 
that  often  signs  count  for  more  than  the  realities  be 
hind  them.  Various  ceremonial  features  of  Christian 
worship,  like  kneeling  or  standing  in  prayer,  bowing 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  135 

the  head  at  certain  signals,  the  passing  of  the  sacra 
mental  bread  and  wine,  the  observance  of  fasts  and 
feasts,  assume  in  his  thoughts,  at  the  outset,  an  im 
portance  that  casts  their  devotional  meaning  into 
shadow.  I  remember  one  prominent  Indian  who  gave 
me  a  deal  of  trouble,  in  an  investigation  I  was  mak 
ing,  by  his  unblushing  perjuries,  but  who  was  accus 
tomed  to  boast  of  his  habit  of  strict  Sabbath-keeping. 
I  knew  another  who,  in  his  ambition  to  be  recognized 
as  a  chief,  did  not  hesitate  to  lead  his  fellow-tribesmen 
into  falsehood,  but  in  his  formal  loyalty  to  his  church 
left  nothing  to  be  desired.  In  each  instance,  I  think, 
the  fault  lay  not  so  much  in  the  man's  conscious 
hypocrisy,  as  in  an  unfilled  gap  between  the  material 
and  the  figurative  in  his  mind.  Contrasting  the  reli 
gion  of  his  fathers  with  that  which  he  had  adopted 
from  the  white  man,  he  had  regarded  these  rather 
as  rival  "  medicines  " — that  is,  as  competitive  devices 
for  conciliating  the  divinities — than  as  expressions  of 
two  utterly  dissimilar  spiritual  attitudes.  The  nobler 
view  of  the  subject,  let  us  hope,  came  later.  .The 
cases  are  mentioned  here  only  to  show  one  of  the 
bridges  across  which  the  red  man  must  be  led  by 
his  white  brother  before  he  can  stand  on  firm 
ground. 

Here  and  there  in  Red  Men's  Land  we  come  upon 
an  extraordinary  mixture  of  Christianity  and  pagan 
ism  woven  into  a  distinctive  religion.  Such  was  the 
ghost-dancing,  or  Messiah  excitement,  which  broke 
out  among  the  Indians  on  the  great  plains  twenty-odd 
years  ago.  The  leaders  of  the  movement  preached 
that  the  government  of  the  world  was  on  the  eve 


136  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

of  a  new  dispensation,  which  was  to  be  ushered  in  by 
the  advent  of  a  Messiah,  or  messenger  from  the 
Great  Spirit,  one  of  whose  functions  it  would  be  to 
restore  to  the  Indians  the  dominion  the  whites  had 
wrested  from  them,  and  bring  the  whole  people  back 
to  the  simple  life  which  preceded  the  European  inva 
sion.  The  dancing  which  was  a  chief  feature  of  the 
demonstration  ended  usually  in  trances,  sometimes  ac 
companied  by  convulsions  and  sometimes  by  a  death 
like  rigidity  of  the  body  and  a  suspension  of  sensa 
tion.  By  degrees,  some  of  the  Indians  who  had  been 
within  reach  of  Christian  instruction  began  to  mingle 
a  few  Christian  rites  with  the  original  manifestations 
of  hysteria,  and  this  gave  the  followers  of  the  cult 
an  excuse  for  meeting  at  intervals  to  pass  a  night  in 
chanting,  prayer,  exhortation,  and  the  consumption  of 
peyote,  a  native  drug  which  induces  visions  like  those 
of  opium  or  hasheesh. 

Among  the  Indians  on  the  northern  Pacific  slope 
we  find  a  religion  locally  styled  "  Shakerism." 
Crosses  and  candles  mounted  on  a  white  altar  are  its 
most  conspicuous  emblems;  the  ringing  of  dinner- 
bells  furnishes  its  music;  its  active  exercises  run 
largely  to  dances  in  which  the  sexes  face  each  other 
and  advance  and  retreat  as  they  sing,  meanwhile  shak 
ing  their  hands  and  bodies  to  drive  out  their  sins, 
and  an  individual  dancer  occasionally  falls  to  the  floor 
insensible.  At  their  stated  meetings  the  elect  wear 
white  robes,  and  cross  themselves  when  they  gravely 
exchange  greetings.  They  have  a  sort  of  baptismal 
service  which  is  repeated  whenever  they  come  to 
gether,  with  a  phraseology  obviously  adapted  from  the 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  137 

baptismal  and  confirmation  services  of  Christian 
churches.  They  perform  also  the  apostolic  rite  of  the 
laying-on  of  hands  to  heal  the  sick;  but  upon  this 
they  have  grafted  the  pagan  conceit  of  creating  a  tre 
mendous  din  at  the  bedside  of  the  patient  in  order 
to  exorcise  the  demons  that  possess  him.  In  justice  to 
the  ghost-dancers  and  the  Indian  "  Shakers,"  I  should 
add  that  those  who  are  most  earnest  in  their  faith 
are,  as  a  rule,  a  fairly  law-abiding  element. 

The  Caucasian  ideal  of  citizenship  is  almost  as  hard 
for  the  Indian  to  comprehend  as  the  Caucasian  ideal 
of  religion.  All  he  sees  of  its  obligations,  at  first,  is 
the  necessity  of  paying  taxes,  and  of  meeting  his  pri 
vate  engagements  on  their  technical  terms  as  the  sole 
means  of  escaping  a  suit  at  law.  These  requirements 
fill  him  with  terror,  as  he  does  not  understand  inter 
est  charges  or  penalties  for  deferred  payments,  but 
realizes  that  back  of  the  tax-gatherer  and  the  usurer 
stands  the  sheriff  at  the  auction-block.  Of  the  privi 
leges  of  citizenship,  two  focus  his  attention:  he  can 
vote  and  hold  office,  and,  if  so  inclined,  can  buy  and 
drink  whiskey  as  freely  as  the  white  man.  His  vote, 
too  commonly,  he  values  more  for  the  uses  to  which 
he  can  put  it  for  his  personal  profit  in  one  way  or 
another,  than  for  its  broader  import,  or  possible  public 
service.  Here  is  where  we  have  still  before  us  a 
very  large  task  in  training  the  Indian  for  his  new 
civic  affiliations. 

I  hope  I  shall  not  be  misinterpreted  when  I  say 
that  among  the  other  lessons  we  shall  have  to  teach 
the  Indian  is  that  of  an  enlightened  selfishness.  It 
will  sound  like  the  paradox  of  "  being  cruel  in  order 


138  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

to  be  kind,"  when  I  explain  that  an  impulse  of  self 
ishness  is  anj^ssential  ingredient  of  all  true  generosity. 
The  chil^  who  cares  nothing  for  his  toys  does  not 
mind  parting  with  them;  when  we  undertake  to  culti 
vate  in  him  a  sense  of  the  beauty  of  giving,  we  encour 
age  him  to  sacrifice  some  object  which  he  really  prizes 
in  order  to  give  pleasure  to  some  one  else.  Most 
normal  children  need  no  preliminary  training  in  sel 
fishness  :  they  absorb  its  spirit  from  their  social  atmos 
phere.  But  the  Indian  who  has  learned  from  child 
hood  to  magnify  the  glory  of  giving,  not  that  the 
beneficiary  may  be  happier  but  that  the  giver  may 
have  praises  heaped  upon  him  in  the  presence  of  the 
multitude,  presents  a  serious  problem;  and  we  puzzle 
him  sorely  with  the  inconsistency  of  our  philosophy 
of  life  when  with  one  breath  we  insist  on  his  holding 
fast  to  his  own,  and  with  the  next  advise  him  to  give 
away  as  much  as  he  can  spare,  and  in  a  manner  which 
will  bring  him  no  visible  benefit. 

The  trouble  is  that  what  passes  with  the  Indian 
for  generosity  is  not  generosity  at  all,  but  mere  prodi 
gality.  The  falseness  of  the  aboriginal  standard  is 
revealed  when  a  man  ambitious  for  fame  as  a  giver 
has  stripped  himself  of  most  that  he  owns,  and  then 
falls  back  upon  others  to  feed  and  clothe  him.  This 
is  a  wrong  to  those  who  have  been  more  provident. 
The  government  and  the  missionaries  have  had  a  long, 
hard  struggle  in  their  effort  to  break  up  the  practice 
of  gift-dances,  where  the  host  of  the  occasion  spreads 
a  public  feast,  and  scatters  among  his  guests  his  blan 
kets,  his  guns,  his  ponies,  his  pipes,  his  household 
utensils — in  short,  whatever  of  his  property  any  one 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  139 

present  may  covet — for  no  better  reason  than  that 
such  unrestrained  largess  is,  according  to  the  tradi 
tions  of  his  people,  a  royal  road  to  eminence.  When 
Indians  were  first  allowed  to  sell  lands  which  had  come 
to  them  by  inheritance,  many  of  the  sellers,  even  those 
who  had  not  for  years  had  a  penny  of  their  own  to 
spend,  squandered  their  money  at  once  on  all  sorts 
of  follies,  and  on  gifts  which  they  distributed  among 
friends  and  strangers  indiscriminately.  Then,  hav 
ing  within  a  few  hours  risen  from  penury  to  affluence 
and  sunk  to  penury  again,  they  fell  back  for  support 
upon  any  relatives  who  could  be  reached,  and  led  a 
life  of  pauperism  to  the  end,  or  till  another  windfall 
came  their  way.  The  relatives  thus  victimized,  little 
as  they  enjoyed  the  experience,  repressed  any  impulse 
to  rebel,  because  that  would  have  exposed  them  to  a 
charge  of  stinginess,  the  meanest  offense  recognized 
in  the  red  man's  code. 

Of  course,  no  people  encumbered  with  such  stand 
ards  can  hope  to  keep  step  with  modern  progress.  It 
therefore  becomes  an  important  part  of  our  business 
to  teach  the  red  man  to  husband  his  resources  and  cling 
to  them  as  his  right,  loosening  his  hold  only  in  response 
to  the  appeal  of  a  worthy  object,  and  then  giving 
not  merely  without  thought  of  advantage  to  himself, 
but  with  due  foresight,  so  that  his  liberality  shall  be 
at  his  own  expense  and  not  at  that  of  his  kinsfolk. 
More  than  once,  intelligent  Indians  have  protested  to< 
me  against  a  grant  of  citizenship  to  a  certain  member 
of  their  tribe,  on  the  ground  that  he  would  undoubt 
edly  sell  his  allotment  as  soon  as  he  was  free  to  do 
so,  throw  the  proceeds  away  recklessly,  and  saddle 


140  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

himself  for  the  rest  of  his  life  upon  some  branch  of 
his  family  who  were  already  having  all  they  could 
do  to  get  along. 

It  is  common  to  ascribe  the  origin  of  every  form 
of  self-indulgence  among  the  Indians  to  white  influ 
ence.  The  white  race  surely  has  enough  to  answer 
for,  but  it  did  not  teach  the  red  race  to  befog  its  brains 
with  strong  drink,  or  to  smoke,  or  to  gamble.  To 
bacco  was  found  in  use  among  these  people  by  the 
earliest  explorers;  and  various  ferments  made  of 
grasses  and  roots,  of  the  bark  of  the  pine  tree,  and 
of  berry  juices,  mashed  maize  treated  with  water  and 
wood  ashes,  and  a  liquid  expressed  from  the  fruit  of 
the  giant  cactus,  afforded  aboriginal  tipplers  the  means 
of  satisfying  their  craving  for  stimulants.  As  for 
games  of  chance,  the  Indian  had  many  before  he  ever 
saw  a  playing-card,  and  some  of  those  which  are  most 
characteristic  appear  to  have  descended  to  him  from 
a  prehistoric  era.  What  the  white  man  has  done  in 
these  lines  is  to  make  it  easier  for  the  Indian  to  be 
come  a  drunkard,  to  encourage  him  to  be  a  worse  one, 
and  to  give  a  more  serious  turn  to  his  gambling  by 
introducing  a  mercenary  motive  into  what  began  as  a 
simple  and  good-humored  amusement. 

With  the  gambling  practice  the  government  has  been 
practically  unable  to  cope.  It  can  be  carried  on  in 
secret;  the  worsted  parties  never  complain  of  the  vic 
tors;  and  none  of  the  gamesters  bear  on  their  persons 
any  mark  of  their  indulgence.  Intoxication,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  a  sufficient  proof  that  strong  drink  is 
now,  or  has  very  recently  been,  near  at  hand,  and  this 
affords  the  constabulary  at  least  a  point  of  departure 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  141 

in  their  search  for  contraband  liquors.  The  federal 
statutes  have  always  been  very  strict  in  their  prohibi 
tion  of  the  introduction  of  intoxicants  into  the  Indian 
country,  and  of  selling  or  giving  them  to  any  Indian 
ward  of  the  government  anywhere  in  the  United 
States;  but  until  the  second  year  of  my  administra 
tion  as  Commissioner  Congress  had  not  appropriated 
any  fund  worth  mentioning  to  pay  the  expenses  of 
an  organized  effort  to  suppress  the  traffic.  Then  it 
placed  $25,000  at  my  disposal  for  this  purpose. 

With  the  aid  of  one  of  the  great  temperance  socie 
ties  I  was  able  to  secure  the  services  of  William  E. 
Johnson,  who  had  already  a  notable  record  as  a  cam 
paigner,  and  who  combined  the  shrewdness  of  a  de 
tective  and  the  courage  of  a  soldier  with  a  gift  for 
infusing  his  own  enthusiasm  into  his  subordinates. 
The  plans  he  projected  required  a  large  appropriation, 
and,  in  view  of  the  mettle  he  displayed  in  his  first 
year's  work,  Congress  was  not  slow  to  vote  the  money; 
the  annual  grant  jumped  suddenly  to  $40,000,  and 
was  carried  up  by  degrees  till  it  reached  $80,000  in  the 
last  year  of  his  service.  He  kept  a  brigade  of  men 
and  women  scattered  all  over  the  Indian  country,  con 
tinually  at  work  ferreting  out  the  dealers  who  sup 
plied  Indians  with  liquor,  and  his  descents  upon  the 
offenders  were  so  noiseless  and  so  sure  that  he  ac 
quired  the  nickname  of  "  Pussyfoot."  He  was  a  ter 
ror  to  wrongdoers  in  his  special  field,  and  his  resigna 
tion  in  1911  was  one  of  the  severest  losses  the  Indian 
Bureau  has  ever  sustained,  though  the  pace  he  set 
has  remained  a  tradition  for  the  inspiration  of  his 
successors. 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

We  have  seen  that  the  Indian  is  not  wasteful  by 
deliberate  intent;  his  shortcomings  in  this  regard  are 
due  to  ignorance,  or  his  different  point  of  view.  He 
seems  to  us  wasteful  of  space,  because  the  great  areas 
over  which  his  people  have  always  roamed  have  had 
no  value  in  their  eyes  except  as  a  game  preserve,  a 
source  of  fuel  and  water,  and  a  grazing  ground  for 
their  horses  or  cattle.  Even  what  has  been  used  for 
tillage  has  been  only  a  trifling  plot  here  and  there. 
In  Red  Man's  Land,  such  a  thing  as  agriculture  in 
the  broader  sense  is  confined  almost  wholly  to  the 
white  settlers,  and  the  intensive  culture  on  which  pos 
terity  must  pin  its  hopes  is  hardly  known  yet  to  the 
whites.  Time  is  another  element  which,  in  our  busy 
life,  we  reckon  at  a  definite  valuation,  but  which  to 
the  Indian  seems  worthless.  Just  as  we  must  teach 
him  that  an  acre  of  land  means,  with  the  right  labor 
expended  on  it,  the  feeding  of  so  many  human  beings, 
so  we  must  make  him  understand  that  a  day  or  an 
hour  frittered  away,  or  not  counted  in  the  cost  of 
any  undertaking,  is  so  much  provision  for  the  future 
wasted.  In  other  words,  it  must  be  impressed  upon 
him  that  the  hand-to-mouth,  happy-go-lucky  mode  of 
existence,  which  answered  for  his  fathers,  will  no 
longer  protect  him  from  suffering,  and  still  less  his 
children. 

Comfort,  convenience,  expedients  for  labor-saving, 
and  the  distinction  between  morality  and  decency  are 
among  the  other  things  of  which  the  red  man  has 
but  the  vaguest  notion.  His  tepee  or  cabin  is  warmed 
only  fitfully  and  ventilated  only  by  accident.  The 
idea  of  so  equipping  his  dwelling  that  the  heat  shall 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  143 

enter  it  regularly  through  one  aperture  while  the 
vitiated  air  is  carried  off  through  another,  and  that 
these  processes  shall  go  on  independently  of  the  whims 
of  the  wind  outside,  does  not  suggest  itself  to  his 
mind  till  some  instructor  lays  hold  of  his  education 
in  the  modern  arts  of  living.  It  is  only  within  recent 
years  that  any  of  the  Pueblo  Indians,  though  building 
houses  of  stone  and  adobe,  have  crowned  these  with 
chimneys;  and  for  a  good  while  after  they  had  been 
induced  to  try  chimneys,  many,  assuming  that  what 
ever  virtue  there  might  be  in  such  structures  was  due 
to  some  magical  charm,  neglected  to  connect  them 
with  the  fireplaces.  I  have  seen  an  Indian  camp 
pitched  within  a  mile  of  a  fine  spring,  and  the  women 
trudging  the  whole  distance  two  or  three  times  a  day, 
carrying  heavy  clay  water-pots  on  their  heads,  be 
cause  it  had  not  struck  any  of  the  party  as  worth  while 
to  move  the  camp  nearer  to  the  source  of  supply.  We 
despise  the  shiftless  white  man  who  is  content  to 
"  get  along  somehow  "  in  order  to  save  himself  a  lit 
tle  trouble;  the  Indian,  left  to  himself,  "gets  along 
somehow"  because  he  does  not  know  how  to  do  any 
thing  better. 

Akin  to  this  ignorance  is  his  false  sense  of  propor 
tion,  and  the  childish  stubbornness  he  sometimes  mani 
fests  when  his  guardians  have  most  conscientiously 
warned  him,  in  terms  that  he  can  and  does  compre 
hend,  of  the  short-sightedness  of  a  certain  course  to 
which  he  is  committing  himself.  For  example,  I  was 
appealed  to  once  to  procure  new  allotments  of  land 
for  a  considerable  group  of  Indians  well  past  middle 
age.  As  young  men,  the  government  had  allotted 


IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

them  each  a  homestead  in  the  midst  of  a  thrifty  farm 
ing  country.  According  to  the  letter  of  the  law 
authorizing  their  allotments,  every  member  of  the 
tribe  was  to  be  allowed  to  decide  for  himself  where 
he  would  take  his  land.  This  particular  band  chose 
theirs  on  a  wooded  hillside,  where  the  soil  was  poor 
and  the  grass  sparse,  but  where  shade  was  abundant 
and  the  view  fine.  In  vain  the  allotting  agent  strove 
to  win  them  away  from  this  choice  by  showing  them 
how  hopeless  a  task  it  would  be  to  try  to  raise  crops 
there,  and  how  the  country  around  them  would  fill  up 
presently  so  that  they  could  not  move  no  matter  how 
bitterly  they  might  repent  their  blunder.  They  con 
temptuously  retorted  that  they  knew  what  they 
wanted  better  than  any  white  man  could  tell  them. 
Was  not  this  a  place  where  they  could  lie  under  the 
trees  and  sweep  the  neighboring  landscape  with  their 
eyes  ?  And  would  not  these  same  groves  furnish  them 
with  fuel  through  the  long  winters  ? 

So  there  they  settled,  and  stayed  till  the  agent's 
forebodings  were  fulfilled.  The  region  did  become 
thickly  populated,  and  all  the  farming  lands  were 
taken  up  by  wiser  men;  meanwhile,  their  beautiful 
groves  retreated  before  the  axe,  as  blazing  hearths 
demanded  the  sacrifice  of  tree  after  tree,  and  neigh 
bors  tempted  them  with  offers  of  money  for  lumber 
and  cordwood.  And  bye-and-bye  the  foolish  little  col 
ony  found  themselves  high  and  dry  on  their  bare  hill 
side  with  nothing  to  eat  and  no  soil  which  they  could 
cultivate  for  food.  It  was  a  sad  plight,  but  one  which 
^ould  not  be  remedied  without  robbing  the  less  ob 
stinate  tribesmen  who,  under  the  allotting  agent's 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  145 

advice,    had    preferred    arable    acres    to    shade    and 
scenery. 

The  relation  between  morality  and  decency  is  one 
which  usually  puzzles  the  Indian,  and  which,  I  am 
bound  to  confess,  seems  too  subtle  for  many  of  our 
own  race  who  have  enjoyed  more  advantages.  I  have 
seen  adult  Indians  going  about,  in  the  midst  of  a  mixed 
company  of  whites,  wearing  garments  so  full  of  holes 
and  gaps  as  to  be  little  better  than  none  at  all,  yet 
honestly  unconscious  of  offence.  I  have  known  an 
old  chief  to  walk  into  the  house  of  a  white  friend, 
and,  meeting  no  one  on  the  lower  floor,  to  ascend 
the  stairs  and  penetrate  the  room  of  one  of  the  ladies 
of  the  family  without  knocking;  yet  when  he  was 
peremptorily  ordered  out,  he  was  astonished  and 
grieved,  so  unsuspicious  was  he  that  he  had  been  doing 
anything  reprehensible.  There  were  no  stairs  in  his 
tepee,  no  locks  on  its  flap,  no  partitions  inside,  no 
barriers  of  any  sort  to  the  coming  and  going  of  whom 
soever  would,  though  it  was  occupied  by  all  the  mem 
bers  of  his  household  and  their  guests;  and  it  had 
never  occurred  to  him  that,  so  long  as  he  cherished  no 
unfriendly  design,  he  had  been  guilty  of  wrong  or  even 
impoliteness  in  thus  intruding.  I  have  Indian  friends 
who  are  personally  as  respectable,  and,  according  to 
their  lights,  as  pure-minded,  as  the  white  class  to 
which  I  belong,  who  do  not  hesitate  to  discuss  the 
innermost  privacies  of  life  in  general  conversation, 
and  with  the  same  freedom  with  which  we  might  talk 
about  the  weather.  Here  is,  plainly,  a  difference  be 
tween  the  social  codes  of  the  primitive  and  the  sophis 
ticated  man,  in  matters  of  appearance,  without  regard 


146  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

to  any  evil  motive  in  the  background.  If  we  would 
have  the  Indian  escape  much  damaging  mis  judg 
ment  in  dealing  with  his  white  neighbors,  we  must 
teach  him  to  respect  their  best-intrenched  conven 
tions  and  observe  the  essentials  of  their  scheme  of 
morality. 

Finally,  we  must  teach  the  Indian  the  virtue — the 
necessity,  in  fact — of  self-dependence  in  the  new  or 
der  of  life  which  we  are  opening  before  him.  His 
reliance  on  "  government "  for  everything  he  wants 
from  food  and  raiment,  medical  attendance  and  edu 
cation,  down  to  legal  aid  in  his  private  litigation,  must 
cease.  It  has  been  absorbed  by  him  from  the  pater 
nalism  with  which  we  have  saturated  our  management 
of  his  affairs.  A  few  of  the  tribes  have  always  been 
too  proud  to  yield  to  this  enervating  influence,  and 
have  insisted  in  a  manly  spirit  on  their  right  to  take 
care  of  themselves  without  assistance  from  Wash 
ington,  but  most  of  them  have  become  more  or  less 
demoralized,  and  it  is  only  recently  that  some  of 
the  rising  generation  have  taken  the  back  track  of 
their  own  volition.  They  have  organized  a  Society  of 
American  Indians — let  the  name  be  noted,  for  it  has 
no  connection  with  any  other  Indian  society  or  order 
— which  is  making  excellent  headway.  It  is  com 
posed  of  some  of  the  most  enterprising  and  honor 
ably  ambitious  young  persons  of  both  sexes  in  the 
several  tribes,  and  includes  in  its  associate  member 
ship  a  number  of  white  friends  and  advisers  who  have 
no  selfish  interest  to  serve.  It  promises  to  be  very  use 
ful  to  the  red  people  everywhere  by  pointing  a  way 
for  their  redemption  from  their  present  state  of  de- 


RED  MAN  AS  TEACHER  AND  LEARNER  147 

pendence,  and  assuring  their  larger  participation  in 
the  work  of  fitting  themselves  for  citizenship. 

Here,  in  closing,  let  me  remind  the  reader  of  what 
I  said  at  the  outset  of  this  volume — that  I  should  deal 
only  with  generalities.  I  have  held  strictly  to  this 
line,  leaving  out  of  special  consideration  the  little 
handful  of  Indians  found  in  every  tribe  who  have 
apprehended  the  meaning  and  adopted  the  standards 
of  the  higher  civilization.  My  aim  has  been  to  show 
what  difficulties  confront  us  in  our  effort  to  lead, 
not  the  well-qualified  few,  but  the  great  ignorant  mass 
of  the  dwellers  in  Red  Man's  Land,  from  their  ancient 
into  our  modern  environment,  from  the  age  of  stone 
into  the  age  of  steel,  out  of  the  shadows  of  a  barbar 
ism  swarming  with  myths  and  mysteries  into  the  sun 
light  of  a  culture  rooted  in  eternal  truth. 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN 

IN  the  preceding  pages  we  read  that  when  our  gov 
ernment  found  it  necessary  to  recognize  the  scat 
tered  tribes  of  primitive  savages  in  different  parts  of 
our  unsurveyed  territory,  it  began  by  dealing  with  them 
as  foreign  nations.  Treaties  were  made  which  the  tribes 
could  not  read  and  could  but  imperfectly  comprehend. 
Reservations  were  set  off  and  the  Indians  were  shut  in. 
Laws  were  framed  for  them — by  those  who  knew  little 
or  nothing  of  Indian  life  and  traditions — to  control  them 
and  to  compel  them  to  remain  within  certain  limits. 
Agencies  were  established  far  removed  from  civilization 
and  beyond  observation — often  beyond  investigation. 
Agents  with  no  knowledge  of  Indian  nature  or  its  in 
grained  characteristics,  even  when  they  were  just  in  pur 
pose,  were  naturally  without  the  sympathy  requisite  to 
gain  the  confidence  and  good-will  of  those  who  resented 
the  encroachments  upon  their  traditional  rights. 

Not  understanding  and  not  understood,  and  otherwise 
helpless,  these  untamed  races  met  the  civilization  of  force 
with  the  force  of  their  barbarism.  The  natural  results 
were  the  frequent  bloody  outbreaks  and  the  Indian  wars 
in  one  tribe  or  another  since  the  white  man  took  posses 
sion  of  the  country.  To  subdue  the  Indians,  government 
money  was  poured  out  like  water.  Indians  were  slaugh 
tered  and  white  men  were  slaughtered,  and  nothing  was 
gained  except  resentful  submission  to  force. 

While  this  was  the  national  method — we  can  hardly 
call  it  policy — there  were  those  who  from  the  very  be 
ginning  believed  in  "  a  more  excellent  way."  There  is 
a  power  greater  than  that  of  armies — the  power  which 
can  change  the  hearts  and  lives  of  men,  even  those  called 
savages,  and  make  them  friends;  this  they  knew.  They 
knew  that  subjugation  is  a  far  cry  from  civilization,  and 
that  Christianity  alone  has  the  secret  of  life  which  car 
ries  with  it  all  the  motives  and  conditions  of  a  true  and 
permanent  civilization.  When  the  inner  life  is  reached 

148 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN          149 

and  renewed,  then  is  that  saying  true,  "  Behold,  I  make 
all  things  new/' 

Acting  upon  the  personal  experience  of  this  "  power  of 
God  "  to  change  the  dispositions  and  the  will  of  man, 
came  the  beginnings  of  missionary  history  among  the 
Indians  in  the  early  settlement  of  our  country.  Roger 
Williams  was  the  pioneer  evangelical  missionary  to  the 
primitive  red  men.  While  yet  in  England  he  had  advo 
cated  the  colonization  of  the  New  World  for  the  propa 
gation  of  the  gospel  to  the  Indians,  and  soon  after  his 
arrival  he  applied  himself  to  their  evangelization.  He 
wrote :  "  God  was  pleased  to  give  me  a  patient  spirit 
to  lodge  with  them  in  their  filthy,  smoky  holes,  even  while 
I  lived  in  Plymouth  and  Salem,  to  gain  their  tongue." 
He  preached  to  the  Pequots,  Narragansetts  and  other 
tribes  in  Rhode  Island,  as  he  says,  "  to  their  great  de 
light  and  convictions." 

DENOMINATIONAL  MISSIONS 
BAPTIST 

The  first  organized  effort  of  the  Baptists  for  the  evan 
gelization  of  the  Indians  was  coincident  with  the  open 
ing  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  In  1801,  Baptist  mission 
aries  labored  among  the  Tuscaroras  and  other  tribes  of 
Western  New  York.  In  1817,  the  work  extended  among 
the  Cherokees,  the  Miamis  and  Kickapoos,  and  in  Michi 
gan  among  the  Potawatomies  and  Ottawas;  in  1828, 
among  the  Ojibwas.  Next  came  missions  in  Georgia 
among  the  Creeks ;  the  Otowes  and  Omahas  in  1822,  and 
the  Delawares  and  Stockbridges  in  1833.  As  far  back 
as  1857  there  were  reported  1,320  Baptist  church  mem 
bers  in  Indian  Territory.  From  the  first  mission  onward 
consecrated  missionaries  have  wrought  with  great  fidel 
ity  and  patience;  if  often  with  little  encouragement,  yet 
at  length  with  rich  rewards  in  the  transformed  char 
acter  and  lives  of  those  whom  they  found  barbarians. 

Missionary  work  with  the  Kiowas,  begun  in  1904,  is 
now  gladdened  with  fifteen  Baptist  churches,  with  1,011 
church  members — including  the  Apache,  Hopi,  Navajo 
and  Crow  tribes,  among  whom  flourishing  missions  exist, 
as  among  the  Monas  of  California.  Among  the  Chey- 
ennes  and  Arapahoes  missions  began  in  1895 ;  there  are 


150  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

now  four  churches,  with  266  communicants.  In  Western 
Oklahoma  ten  churches  rejoice  in  958  members;  and 
to-day  in  two  tribes  and  in  Oklahoma  there  are  about 
4,500  Indians  who  are  members  of  Baptist  churches. 
Many  of  these  are  ministered  to  by  native  preachers, 
some  of  whom  have  much  ability.  Indian  University  at 
Muskogee,  Okla.,  ministers  largely  to  civilized  tribes. 
The  denomination  has  expended  among  the  Indians  over 
$400,000.  The  average  annual  expenditure  is  about 
$20,000. 

Many  of  the  chiefs  and  leading  men  in  the  various 
tribes  have  been  converted.  These  have  wrought  for  the 
peace  of  the  land  as  the  government  could  not  do,  and 
have  done  much  to  lay  the  foundations  for  the  future  of 
a  peace  that  shall  express  itself  in  Christian  brotherhood. 

CONGREGATIONAL 

In  1646,  Eliot  and  Mayhew  were  "  apostles  "  to  the  In 
dians.  Eliot  wrote :  "  I  found  a  pregnant-witted  young 
Indian  who  had  been  a  servant  in  an  English  house,  who 
pretty  well  understood  our  language,  and  well  understood 
his  own.  By  his  help  I  translated  the  Commandments 
and  many  texts  of  Scripture/'  The  more  purely  per 
sonal  work  of  these  missionaries  and  of  Sargent  and 
Wheelock  among  the  New  England  tribes  was  followed 
by  no  organized  work  by  the  Congregationalists  until 
1815,  when  the  American  Board  for  Foreign  Missions 
began  its  missions.  At  that  time  the  entire  Indian  popu 
lation  of  the  country  was  estimated  to  be  240,000.  Soon 
missions  were  established  among  the  Cherokees,  Chicka- 
saws  and  Creeks,  and  later,  in  1827,  the  work  was  more 
widely  extended.  The  difficulties  of  the  missionaries 
were  greatly  increased  by  the  frequent  violations  of  the 
government  treaties.  The  mission  among  the  Chero 
kees  was  broken  up  by  the  State  of  Georgia — a  black 
page  of  history.  This  led  to  missions  in  the  Northwest, 
fifteen  in  all,  especial  attention  being  given  to  the  40,000 
Sioux.  These  warlike  tribes  were  subject  to  great  ex 
asperations  by  the  constant  encroachments  of  unscrupu 
lous  white  men,  which  hindered  and  imperilled  Christian 
efforts.  In  1847,  the  American  Missionary  Association 
began  missions  among  the  Chippewas,  the  Ojibwas  and 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN  151 

Ottawas  in  Michigan,  and,  as  the  year  passed,  in  Wis 
consin  and  Washington  territories.  The  American  Board 
at  Santee,  Nebr.,  after  ten  years  among  the  Sioux,  had 
organized  and  maintained  a  church  of  more  than  200 
converted  Indians,  which  was  in  the  care  of  a  native 
pastor  of  exceptional  ability  and  Christian  devotion.  In 
1882,  the  entire  organized  missionary  work  of  the  Con 
gregational  churches  among  the  Indians  came  under  the 
care  of  the  American  Missionary  Association,  and  since 
that  time  there  has  been  significant  advance  both  in  the 
development  of  schools  for  Christian  education  and  for 
evangelization  in  the  Indian  encampments.  Twenty-one 
Indian  churches,  with  114  missionaries  and  more  than 
11,000  church  members,  are  taking  the  Light  of  the  world 
into  the  darkness  of  paganism. 

FRIENDS 

The  Friends'  Missions  began  in  1870,  when  President 
Grant  apportioned  the  care  of  the  Indians  among  the  dif 
ferent  religious  denominations.  There  are  now  ten  sta 
tions  with  resident  missionaries  among  the  Shawnees, 
the  Osages,  Modocs  and  Kickapoos  in  Oklahoma.  The 
earlier  years  of  the  Friends'  work  were  largely  devoted 
to  education,  but  since  the  government  schools  have  come 
to  care  for  the  secular  education  the  missions  have  con 
fined  themselves  to  direct  evangelization  to  Christianize 
the  Indians.  During  the  past  year  twelve  Indians  have 
been  hopefully  converted  and  have  entered  upon  Chris 
tian  life.  A  steady  advance  has  been  apparent  among 
many  of  the  Indians,  and  the  scale  of  general  intelligence 
perceptibly  improves,  accompanied  in  many  cases  by  im 
provement  in  morals.  The  Friends  are  withdrawing  from 
stations  where  Indians  and  whites  are  living  in  the  same 
communities,  to  give  more  attention  to  strictly  Indian 
work  among  uncivilized  tribes.  The  appropriation  for 
the  year  was  $5,577. 

METHODIST  EPISCOPAL 

The  Indian  missions  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church 
(including  those  of  the  Woman's  Home  Missionary  So 
ciety  )are  located  in  Washington,  Oregon,  Arizona,  Wis 
consin,  Minnesota,  Montana,  Nevada,  California,  New 


152  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

Mexico,  North  Carolina,  Michigan,  Kansas  and  Okla 
homa.  In  twenty-four  tribes  and  other  parts  of  tribes 
there  are  forty  Indian  churches  and  twenty-one  Indian 
stations,  in  which  twenty-two  white  and  ten  Indian  mis 
sionaries  are  engaged.  These  churches  report  2,300 
members,  with  5,000  adherents,  who  hear  the  gospel  and 
are  hopeful  subjects  for  missionary  endeavor;  all  main 
tain  Sunday-schools,  with  an  enrolment  of  1,600  chil 
dren.  The  Woman's  Society  has  an  industrial  home  and 
school  for  the  Navajos  at  Farmington,  N.  M. ;  settle 
ment  work  in  Washington,  and  mission  stations  in  Cali 
fornia,  Kansas  and  Oklahoma.  The  total  appropriation 
for  the  year  is  $21,502. 

METHODIST  EPISCOPAL  CHURCH,  SOUTH 

The  Methodist  Episcopal  Church,  South,  numbers  2,900 
Indian  communicants  in  Oklahoma,  with  twenty-five  In 
dian  ministers,  who  labor  there  among  four  tribes. 

The  Woman's  Missionary  Council  employs  a  mission 
ary  among  the  Kiowas ;  she  visits  in  the  camps,  teaches 
the  Bible  and  holds  mothers'  meetings. 

MORAVIAN 

The  evangelization  of  the  Indians  was  one  of  the  chief 
motives  which  brought  the  Moravians  to  America.  The 
work  began  in  1735.  It  was  unpopular  from  the  start 
with  the  white  settlers,  as  also  with  some  of  the  Indian 
tribes.  The  early  missionaries  pursued  their  work  in 
Georgia,  North  Carolina,  New  York,  Pennsylvania  and 
Connecticut.  As  their  charges  were  forced  westward, 
the  missionaries  accompanied  them.  Zeizsberger,  the 
greatest,  who  served  more  years  with  the  Indians  than 
any  other  missionary,  not  excepting  Eliot,  was  adopted 
by  the  warlike  Iroquois  and  made  their  archivist,  and 
for  one  whole  year  (1777-78)  prevented  them  from  at 
tacking  the  exposed  western  frontier  of  the  American 
colonies  during  the  Revolution — a  fact  little  known. 

The  missions  suffered  persecutions,  and  even  frightful 
massacres,  at  the  hands  of  the  whites,  completely  de 
stroying  some  stations.  As  the  red  men  moved,  the  work 
was  carried  into  Ohio,  Illinois,  Michigan,  Ontario,  In 
dian  Territory  and  Kansas,  but  all  stations  have  now  been 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN          15S 

given  up  or  handed  over  to  other  denominations,  except 
five  in  California,  manned  by  three  ordained  clergymen 
and  their  wives,  ministering  definitely  to  about  300  souls, 
besides  a  large  number  of  adherents.  The  salary  of 
one  of  the  missionary  couples  is  paid  by  a  group  of  twenty 
young  people's  societies  in  the  East.  The  board  expends 
from  $2,000  to  $3,000  per  annum. 

PRESBYTERIAN 

Presbyterian  missions  for  the  Indian  date  back  to  a 
long  line  of  self-sacrificing  missionaries  among  the  Chero- 
kees,  Chippewas,  Choctaws,  Sioux,  Umatillas  and  Nez 
Perces  down  to  the  present-day  company  of  devoted  men 
and  women,  faithful  witnesses  to  the  grace  and  power  of 
the  gospel  of  Christ.  The  missions  of  the  Presbyterian 
Church  are  large  with  results  and  have  abundantly  justi 
fied  the  faith  of  those  who  have  sustained  them  in  the 
long  series  of  years.  The  work  at  the  present  time  is 
in  twenty-six  states,  among  fifty-seven  tribal  divisions. 
There  are  one  hundred  and  thirty-four  missionaries  now 
under  appointment  of  the  Presbyterian  Board  of  Mis 
sions,  eighteen  of  whom  are  entirely  supported  by  In 
dian  churches  and  native  missionary  societies.  There 
are  one  hundred  and  sixteen  organized  churches,  with 
one  hundred  and  eighteen  additional  stations,  where  serv 
ices  are  held  under  the  ministry  of  thirty-nine  Indian 
missionaries.  These  Indian  churches  number  more  than 
7,000  communicants  and  more  than  18,000  adherents, 
who  to  a  greater  or  less  extent  are  receptive  of  the  in 
fluences  of  the  gospel.  Eleven  mission  .schools  are  edu 
cating  and  training  473  pupils. 

These  Presbyterian  missions  are  located  in  California, 
Oregon,  Washington,  Idaho,  Utah,  Wyoming,  North  and 
South  Dakota,  Montana,  Wisconsin,  Michigan,  Nebraska, 
Kansas,  Oklahoma,  Colorado,  New  Mexico,  Arizona  and 
also  among  the  Iroquois  in  the  State  of  New  York — a 
great  record.  Much  interest  is  felt  in  Indian  missions  in 
Alaska.  The  missions  among  the  Sioux  in  South  Dakota 
have  been  blessed  with  exceptional  results,  the  Yankton 
Indians  being  especially  noted  for  their  development  in 
education  and  in  Christian  character,  and  for  their  prog 
ress  in  the  knowledge  and  practice  of  civilized  life. 


154?  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

PROTESTANT  EPISCOPAL 

Indian  missions  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 
began  in  Colonial  days.  In  1701  a  missionary  was  sent 
to  the  Six  Nations  living  in  the  valley  of  the  Mohawk. 
After  the  Revolutionary  War,  which  interrupted  all  mis 
sionary  work,  this  church  renewed  its  interest,  and  from 
that  day  until  now  has  been  most  zealous  and  constant 
in  its  ministering,  with  large  rewards  in  Christian  con 
versions  and  the  development  of  Christian  character  and 
life. 

To-day  its  Domestic  and  Foreign  Missionary  Society 
is  carrying  on  hopeful  work  for  the  Indians  in  Alaska, 
Arizona,  Minnesota,  Wisconsin,  Idaho,  Oklahoma,  Cali 
fornia,  Utah,  Wyoming,  South  Dakota  and  Florida.  Re 
cent  Indian  missions  in  Alaska  have  been  greatly  blessed. 
Its  greatest  work  has  been  in  South  Dakota  where  ninety- 
five  stations  in  charge  of  twenty-three  clergy— of  whom 
sixteen  are  Indians — are  ministering  to  11,705  Sioux,  of 
whom  4,982  are  communicants  of  the  church.  The  gifts 
of  these  communicants  alone  to  the  Episcopal  Church 
amount  to  more  than  $10,000  year  by  year.  This  fact 
speaks  for  itself. 

The  entire  work  of  the  missions  requires  the  serv 
ices  of  forty-eight  clergymen,  one  hundred  and  fifteen 
laymen  and  fifty-one  women,  who  minister  to  6,000  In 
dian  communicants  scattered  over  twelve  dioceses  and 
districts,  with  a  yearly  expenditure  of'  no  less  than 
$76,028.  Wherever  this  church  has  planted  itself  by 
church,  chapel  and  schools,  there  has  been  a  gratifying 
advance  in  morals  and  manner  of  living. 

REFORMED  CHURCH  IN  AMERICA 

The  Indian  missions  of  the  Reformed  Church  in 
America  are  efficiently  directed  and  administered  by  the 
Women's  Board  of  Domestic  Missions.  They  are  car 
ried  on  among  the  Arapahoes,  Cheyennes,  Apaches,  Co- 
manches  in  Oklahoma,  the  Winnebagos  in  Nebraska  and 
the  Mescaleros  in  New  Mexico.  These  various  missions 
call  for  the  ministry  of  eighteen  missionaries  and  four 
interpreters. 

Among  the  Arapahoes  and  Cheyennes  there  is  a  church 
membership  of  273  Christian  Indians,  with  130  youths 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN          155 

enrolled  in  the  Sunday-schools.  The  native  Christians 
In  this  comparatively  recent  missionary  work  contributed 
during  the  past  year  for  Christian  missions  and  evangeli 
zation  among  their  people  the  sum  of  $534.58. 

In  April  last  the  Fort  Sill  Apaches,  who  were  held  by 
the  government  as  prisoners-of-war,  were  released  and 
the  tribe  was  broken  up.  One  hundred  and  seventy-five 
were  transferred  to  the  Mescalero  Reservation,  among 
the  mountains  of  New  Mexico,  where  a  band  of  Apaches 
had  for  some  time  been  located.  A  part  of  the  tribe 
elected  to  remain  in  Oklahoma.  A  ministry  among  them 
has  been  continued.  Of  this  warlike  Apache  tribe  thirty- 
one  were  received  into  the  communion  of  the  church 
last  year.  In  the  Comanche  Mission  eighteen  have  been 
received  in  church  membership  during  the  past  year, 
and  there  has  been  a  beautiful  response  to  Christian 
influences. 

In  the  Mescalero  Apache  Mission  seventeen,  during 
the  year  1913,  united  with  the  church  on  confession  of 
their  faith  in  Christ.  To  this  church  were  added  by  let 
ter  on  one  Sunday  eighty-eight  of  the  Apache  members 
transferred  from  Fort  Sill. 

The  work  among  the  Winnebagos,  begun  five  years 
ago,  has  been  wonderfully  successful.  There  are  200 
members  of  the  church,  all  of  whom  have  been  won  in 
this  short  time.  The  work  has  been  made  more  difficult 
through  the  vices  of  white  people.  The  suppression  of 
the  liquor  traffic  among  the  Indians  has  met  with  strong- 
opposition,  but  the  Christian  influence  has  been  yet 
stronger  and  the  work  is  hopeful  under  God's  favor. 

There  are  in  all  750  Indians  in  the  communion  of  the 
Reformed  Church  in  America  in  connection  with  its 
missions. 

The  total  amount  expended  for  the  year  in  these  sev 
eral  missions  was  $27,152. 

UNDENOMINATIONAL  MISSIONS 

The  National  Indian  Rights  Association  has  Indian 
missions  in  Arizona,  Wisconsin,  California  and  New 
Mexico.  This  association  does  pioneer  work  and  has 
planted  fifty  missions  which  have  been  transferred  to 
other  hands. 


156  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

Y.  M.  C.  A.  AND  Y.  W.  C.  A. 

The  Young  Men's  and  the  Young  Women's  Christian 
Associations  have  engaged  in  a  specially  important  fea 
ture  of  missionary  work  among  the  pupils  in  the  various 
government  schools  and  among  the  returned  students 
on  the  Indian  reservations  These  students,  on  returning 
from  schools  such  as  Carlisle  and  Hampton  to  the  com 
parative  isolation  and  limitations  of  tribal  life,  are  not 
only  subject  to  temptations  incident  to  both  heredity  and 
environment,  but  they  also  greatly  feel  the  differences 
in  the  changes  and  modes  of  life.  These  two  associa 
tions  come  to  them  when  they  realize  the  need  of  friendly 
sympathy  and  friendly  hands  extended  in  Christian  love 
and  brotherhood  and  sisterhood.  The  young  Indian  peo 
ple — 35,000  being  returned  students — are  very  happy  to 
be  included  in  organizations  which  take  in  students  of 
the  wide  world,  and  it  is  a  great  inspiration  and  motive 
for  them  that  they  may  be  thus  associated.  These  Young 
Men's  Christian  Associations  and  Young  Women's  Chris 
tian  Associations  have  proved  to  be  greatly  helpful  in 
thus  ministering  to  those  who  are  likely  to  be  of  future 
influence  in  their  tribes,  and  they  should  be  generously 
encouraged  in  their  interesting  work. 

UNTILLED  FIELDS 

Meanwhile,  the  fact  faces  the  churches  that  there  are 
54,000  Indians  among  whom  no  missionary  work  is  being 
conducted,  and  that  24,000  Indian  children  of  school  age 
have  no  school  facilities  and  are  not  in  any  school.  This 
may  assure  the  Christian  people  of  our  country  that  the 
red  man  needs  all  of  these  missions,  and  needs  them 
greatly. 

GOVERNMENT  EDUCATION  AND  MISSIONS 

When  in  1870  a  new  Indian  policy  was  inaugurated  by 
the  United  States  Government,  it  was  really  a  by-product 
of  the  various  Christian  missions.  The  missions  had 
taught  the  government  a  lesson.  It  had  come  to  realize 
that  the  red  man  could  indeed  take  on  civilization,  and 
that  patient  missionary  fidelity  and  devotion  were  as 
suredly  transforming  character  and  life.  Hence,  came 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN          157 

the  system  of  education  in  government  schools  as  a 
preparation  for  Indian  manhood  and  citizenship.  Since 
that  time  the  government  has  expended  about  $350,000,- 
ooo  in  the  development  of  its  Indian  policy,  including  edu 
cation,  which  has  brought  a  new  day  for  the  Indian. 
The  government  must  have  credit  for  the  lesson  it 
learned,  though  it  took  a  long  time  to  learn  it.  It  could, 
however,  but  in  part  adopt  the  missionary  idea.  It  could 
give  the  Indian  secular  education ;  but  it  could  offer  noth 
ing  to  meet  the  Indians'  most  immediate  and  supremest 
need. 

The  red  man  has  an  instinct  for  religion.  He  has  al 
ways  believed  in  the  Infinite  Spirit.  His  untutored  heart 
asked  after  God.  But  we  are  not  left  in  ignorance  as  to 
what  his  religion  was.  It  exists  to-day.  It  was  and  is 
the  religion  of  darkened  minds  and  darkened  hearts, 
swarming  with  myths  and  mysteries,  and  the  rankest 
superstitions,  the  fruitage  of  which  could  be  nothing 
other  than  the  gross  heathenism  which  missionaries  have 
found  in  all  tribes  and  which  still  exists  among  the  tribes 
uninfluenced  by  Christianity,  and  so  far  as  tribes  have 
not  yielded  to  this  influence. 

The  government  in  its  new  policy,  with  its  secular 
schools,  had  no  religion  to  offer  the  Indian.  It  could  edu 
cate,  but  it  could  not  evangelize,  convert  and  nurture  him 
in  the  Christian  faith.  It  could  not  provide  for  his  spir 
itual  nature.  That  is  not  the  function  of  the  government. 
It  is  not  engaged  in  regenerating  the  inner  life  of  its 
subjects.  Yet  without  this  renewal  in  the  spirit  of  his 
mind  the  red  man  can  never  be  redeemed  from  heathen 
ism  and  fitted  for  life,  with  standards  and  character  that 
will  meet  the  tests  of  life  here  and  hereafter.  The  mis 
sions  went  to  the  Indians  with  the  promise  of  a  gracious 
life,  and  they  made  it  good.  The  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ 
does  change  the  red  man's  ideas  and  ideals  of  life.  It 
does  renew  the  spirit  of  his  mind.  He  becomes  a  new 
man  in  his  affections  and  desires.  The  missions  have 
brought  and  do  bring  the  bread  of  life  to  the  hunger  of 
his  heart. 

The  marks  of  a  progress  that  is  steady  and  full  of 
hopeful  purpose  are  all  along  in  the  paths  of  the  mis 
sionaries.  "  The  Christian  Indian/'  says  Dr.  Rigg-s,  who 


158  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

has  spent  his  entire  life  among  the  Sioux,  "  is  the  only 
man  among  them  all  who  in  the  movement  toward  civili 
zation  keeps  his  place  and  holds  fast  to  the  progress  he 
has  made." 

In  the  limitations  of  this  chapter  it  is  not  possible  to 
illustrate  by  special  examples  the  appeal  which  Christian 
missions  make  for  the  Indian.  Allow  one — from  a  mis 
sionary  product,  David  Hare,  a  Sioux : — "  What  we  need 
is  a  Christian  education  that  will  strengthen  us  to  resist 
the  adversaries  which  come  with  the  White  Man's  civili 
zation.  The  government  is  doing  much  for  our  people, 
and  must  be  given  credit  for  what  it  has  accomplished, 
but  it  is  Christianity  that  changes  the  people.  The  real 
salvation  must  be  from  the  inside,  and  not  from  the  out 
side.  All  the  forces  at  work  for  the  government  for  our 
advancement  do  not  and  could  not  come  up  to  the  work 
which  the  patient,  earnest  missionary  is  doing  and  has 
done  from  the  beginning." 

A  like  word  comes  from  Henry  Roe  Cloud,  a  Winne- 
bago,  brought  to  know  and  follow  Christ  by  a  mission 
ary,  a  graduate  of  Yale  University  in  the  class  of  1910. 
"  It  is  very  important,"  he  says,  "  to  remember  that  the 
salvation  of  the  Indian  must  be  from  within.  I  should 
not  be  true  to  the  deepest  convictions  of  my  soul  if  I 
did  not  say  this.  Now  is  the  time  to  go  after  the  Indian 
and  to  strengthen  by  the  power  of  the  gospel  the  work 
of  these  missions." 

These  men  are  types.  One  whose  life  has  been  de 
voted  to  the  red  man  brings  the  final  word.  It  is  this: 
"  Through  our  Christian  missions  there  is  a  change  in 
thought  and  in  outlook  of  far  more  importance  than  all 
others,  for  it  marks  the  growth  of  manhood  and  gives 
permanent  hope  for  the  future.  The  spirit  of  Chris 
tianity  has  greatly  changed  the  Indians'  thought.  We 
have  taught  them  that  Christ  came  to  save  men  from 
evil ;  that  religion  is  more  than  an  outward  change ;  that 
it  means  a  change  of  heart  which  will  insure  all  right 
development.  This  and  this  only  will  bring  a  wild  and 
insubordinate  race  of  people  to  become  gentle,  kind, 
thoughtful  and  industrious,  And  in  this  teaching  we 
have  not  failed," 


MISSIONS  TO  THE  RED  MAN          159 

MISSIONS  IN  ALASKA 

The  Congregational  Home  Missionary  Society  and 
the  American  Missionary  Association  have  been  working 
in  Alaska  among  the  Eskimos  and  others  for  more  than 
twenty  years.  They  have  a  church  of  Eskimos  in  North 
ern  Alaska,  on  Bering  Strait,  of  more  than  three  hun 
dred  members. 

The  Board  of  Missions  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  has  a  large  and  very  important  work  in  Alaska, 
among  the  Eskimos,  the  Indians  and  the  miners  and 
traders.  Work  is  sustained  at  twenty-five  localities. 
Fairbanks,  the  metropolis  of  central  Alaska,  was  a  new 
mining  plant  when  Bishop  Rowe  secured  an  early 
entrance  for  the  church.  The  log  building  which  was  a 
chapel  on  Sundays,  became  a  reading  room  on  week-days 
for  the  rough-clad  miners.  A  hospital  was  built  which 
ministered  to  the  sick  through  a  wide  range  of  territory. 
Missions  both  to  white  men  and  Indians  have  spread 
along  the  valley  of  the  river  on  either  hand,  and  now 
Fairbanks  is  the  center  of  what  is  known  as  the  Tanana 
Valley  Mission,  with  half  a  score  of  workers,  schools 
and  missions,  hospitals  and  reading  rooms,  and  carrying 
everywhere  the  message  of  the  Master. 

At  Fort  Yukon,  far  up  the  great  river,  is  a  missionary- 
physician,  the  only  one  within  five  hundred  miles  of  his 
post,  and  the  dauntless  doctor  with  his  dog  team  counts 
one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  as  nothing  in  an  effort  to 
minister  to  the  suffering. 

In  addition  to  its  work  for  white  populations  in  Alaska, 
the  Presbyterian  Church  has  now  eleven  missions  for 
native  Alaskans,  with  thirty-two  outstations.  Ten  of 
these  missions  (Wrangell,  Sitka,  Juneau,  Haines, 
Hoonah,  Klawock,  Klukwan,  Saxman,  Hydaburg,  and 
Kake)  are  in  the  southeast  or  Sitkan  peninsula.  One 
missionary  is  at  Barrow,  the  northernmost  point  of 
Alaska, 

Under  the  Woman's  Board  of  Home  Missions,  the 
school  work  is  now  centralized  at  the  Sheldon  Jackson 
School  (in  Sitka),  newly  built  and  equipped,  a  co-edu 
cational  boarding  school  for  Alaskan  youth  of  all  tribes. 
The  course  of  study,  in  which  Bible  instruction  is  empha- 


160  IN  RED  MAN'S  LAND 

sized,  covers  eight  grades.  Vocational  training  includes 
domestic  science,  domestic  art,  wood-carving,  carpentry, 
blacksmith  work,  boat-building,  etc. 

At  Haines,  there  is  a  small  hospital  in  charge  of  a 
physician  and  two  helpers,  treating  three  hundred  and 
iifty  patients  a  month. 

Under  the  Board  of  Home  Missions  are  seven  ordained 
missionaries  for  native  work,  with  five  who  minister  also 
to  white  parishioners.  There  are  eleven  native  helpers. 
The  Woman's  Board  supports  the  three  workers  at 
Raines,  and  the  fifteen  at  Sheldon  Jackson  School. 

During  the  fiscal  year  1912-13,  the  Board  of  Home 
Missions,  including  the  Woman's  Board,  expended 
$50,222  for  native  work  in  Alaska. 

The  Methodist  Episcopal  Church  supports  missionaries 
in  Alaska,  at  Fairbanks,  Juneau,  Ketchikan,  Nome, 
Seward,  and  Skagway.  The  Woman's  Home  Mission 
ary  Society  has  an  industrial  home  and  school,  with  a 
hospital,  on  Unalaska,  one  of  the  islands  of  the  Aleutian 
chain.  This  ministers  to  the  needs  of  Aleuts,  while 
Eskimo  on  the  mainland  are  reached  through  mission 
stations  at  Nome  and  Sinuk.  Total  appropriation  of  the 
church  for  current  year,  for  Alaskan  work,  $19,654. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(Order  books  from  the  publishers  named,  not  from  denomina 
tional  headquarters.) 

D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

The  Story  of  the  Indian.    George  Bird  Grinnell.    $1.50. 

Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 

The  Vanishing  Race.    Dr.  Joseph  Dixon.    $3.50 
Indian  Boyhood.     Charles  Eastman.    $1.60. 

Duffield  &  Co. 

The  Indian  of  To-day.     George  Bird  Grinnell.    $2.00. 
Geronimo's  Story  of  His  Life.    $1.50. 

Houghton   Mifflin  Company. 

The  Soul  of  the  Indian.    Charles  Eastman.    $1.00. 

Indian  Department.    Washington,  D.  C. 
Indian  Affairs :  Laws  and  Treaties. 

L.  C.  Page  £  Co. 

Our  Little  Indian  Cousin.     Mary  Hazelton  Wade.    $.60. 

Little,  Brown  &  Co. 

The  Indian  Dispossessed.     Seth  K.  Humphrey.     $1.50. 
The  Oregon  Trail.    Francis  Parkman.    $1.50. 

Macmillan  Company. 

Lights  and  Shadows  of  a  Long  Episcopate.    Rt.  Rev.  H.  B. 
Whipple.    $2.00. 

Presbyterian  Board  of  Publications. 

The  Story  of  Marcus  Whitman.    $1.00. 

Public  Library. 

The  North  American  Indian.     Edward  S.  Curtis.     (20  vols.) 
The  Indian's  Book.     Natalie  Curtis. 
Indian  Story  and  Song.    Alice  Fletcher: 

Revell  Company. 

The  Apostle  of  the  North.    James  Evans.    $1.25. . 
Two  Wilderness  Voyagers.    F.  W.  Calkins.    $.50. 
My  Host  the  Enemy.    F.  W.  Calkins.    $.50. 
Life  of  Sheldon  Jackson.     Robert  L.  Stewart.    $2.00. 
Among  the  Thlingets.    Livingstone  F.  Jones.     $1.50. 

Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 

The  Indian  and  His  Problem.     Francis  E.  Leupp.    $2.00. 
Missionary  Explorers  Among  the  American  Indians.    M.  G. 
Humphreys.    $1.50. 

161 


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